Brew

by Bill Braddock

  Someone slammed into her. A girl, choking. Being choked. She spun away into a crowd of punching and kicking lunatics, some of them laughing, some screaming.

  Through a break in the crowd, she saw Stat Boy flailing one of his friends, pummeling him with awkward punches until he himself was hoisted into the air by the towering football player, who bellowed and tossed him over the crowd, where Stat Boy sheered the beer taps and disappeared in a gushing fountain of foaming beer behind the bar. There, the bartenders clustered, swinging liquor bottles like clubs as people went over the bar at them. She caught a flash of Jimmy, shouting to the other bartenders and looking perfectly sane. He pointed a smashed bottle toward a door on the back wall.

  Yes, Liz thought, a door, any door. She had to get out.

  But how? It was one big fight in here, people hurting each other, people killing each other.

  "Oh!" she said as she watched someone stomp the head of a girl who’d fallen a few feet away. It was the cute boy, the hello boy, the boy from Gabbie’s high school, her bitch…

  He turned, saw her, and grinned. This smile was different now, though. It was crazy and mean, wolfishly wide, and she saw that his teeth were leaking a slime just as bright and green as the melon liqueur she’d been drinking.

  He charged.

  Liz shrieked and dipped under his arms. Miraculously, he missed.

  Turning, she saw that his charge had carried him into another fight. The bar was completely overrun now. She couldn’t see Jimmy or the other bartenders at all.

  What was wrong with all of these people? What the hell was going on?

  "Gabbie!" she said, running to her fallen roommate, who was struggling onto all fours.

  Jackie was five feet away, bouncing some girl’s head off a toppled table.

  "Gabbie!" Liz said, reaching for her. "We have to get out of here!"

  Gabbie lifted her head. Her wrap had come undone. Bare to the world, her perfect breasts wobbled on her taut, sinewy body, all of her streaked in blood running from a gash in her forehead. She grinned at Liz, and her grin was the same as the boy’s grin, huge and mean and oozing green.

  She jumped out of her crouch.

  "Gabbie!" Liz yelled, but it was no good. Gabbie tackled Liz, then straddled her, pinning her to the floor like a bullying older brother. She laughed and screamed all at once, her mouth foaming green lather.

  Then she started punching. These were no playful slaps, friend to friend; these were hard, honest-to-goodness punches, all fist and knuckle that smashed into Liz’s head and made the world blink and shower with sparks, sending her into a panic. She had never been punched before, not in the face. It hurt so much! She tried to scream, tried to beg, but Gabbie wouldn’t stop. Punches exploded into Liz’s teeth, flattened her nose, smashed her eye shut.

  Stop! Stop! Stop!

  But she couldn’t even cover her face, not with her arms pinned. She could only yelp and groan and do her best to twist side to side as more punches rained down.

  There came a pause in the punches as Gabbie rocked backward, drawing a fist to her shoulder, laughing, and measuring what promised to be the hardest punch yet. Liz, who could barely breathe, managed somehow to free an arm. She covered her face, crying. "Stop!" she pleaded. "Stop!"

  And then, quite unexpectedly, Gabbie did stop. All at once the punches ended, but the weight of her did not lift.

  Gasping for air and jerking her head away from a passing sneaker, Liz felt her roommate moving on her, grinding into her, riding her. Grinding and thrusting her hips.

  And when Liz opened her eyes, she saw that Gabbie, queen of all filthy jokes, was living up to all the crude talk she’d slung. A crowd of boys had gathered around her, their erect penises jutting hard into her face. She sucked one and grabbed others with her hands, making growling sounds. Others poked into her pretty face. One slapped her in the forehead. Another jabbed into her open eye. Liz was stunned.

  Then Gabbie was shaking her head back and forth and tugging hard, and blood sprayed from the boy’s crotch, splashing hot on Liz’s face and all but blinding her. Squinting and screaming, she saw a hand draw across Gabbie’s throat, saw the glass it held, saw the throat open, and then saw only red as the world washed away in hot blood…

  Chapter 6

  "What the hell?" Cat said.

  Steve drew his hands away from her. "I don’t know."

  Up and down the hall, above them, below them, even out on the streets, people were screaming; and it wasn’t that brand of happy screaming you became used to as a resident of a college town, that joyous group shouting that occurred every time the home team scored a touchdown during a televised game; no, this was real screaming, the type of screaming one does when there’s nothing else to do. Next came slamming and smashing. Walls and doors thudded, plates smashed, cars collided outside. Steve went to the window.

  Three stories down, a red pickup truck lay steaming on its side against a telephone pole. Behind it, a tangle of smashed cars jammed the avenue. Someone’s horn was stuck. Steve watched a driver crawl from the wreckage of what had been a sweet little sports car. The driver, a middle-aged guy in a pink Polo shirt, screamed and waved something overhead—a tire iron, perhaps—as he advanced on drivers emerging from ruined vehicles.

  "Talk about road rage," Steve said. "He’s…holy shit, he just dropped that woman!"

  Cat crossed the room and stood on tiptoes, looking through the peephole out into the hall, where it sounded like the football teams had agreed on a second game. Her calf muscles were taut. Steve’s eyes drifted over them and up her tight body, over the A+ ass and the bare back and the black bra and the raven hair, which shimmered even in the low light of the apartment. Of all the rotten luck, Steve thought; all this weirdness had to break out the moment I was going to pat her down. He moved in behind her.

  "Look," Cat said. She leaned away so he could look out the peephole, but she was still near enough that he could smell her good smell and feel her warm breath on his neck. He rested his palm on the small of her bare back. "People are going crazy," she whispered.

  Indefinite motion blurred the edges of his peephole view.

  "Fucking crazy!" somebody shouted.

  Growling.

  "Get off of me! Get!" It was a guy’s voice, high-pitched and scared as hell. "Help!"

  Something thumped, and the wall shivered.

  "Somebody’s getting killed," Cat said, undoing the chain lock.

  Steve caught her hand. "Don’t be insane," he said. "We’re not going out there."

  The screaming grew more desperate, the screamer no longer using words.

  She pushed Steve’s hand away. "They need help." She twisted the bolt, ignoring Steve’s suggestion that she at least put a shirt on, and then she was in the hall. Against his better judgment, Steve followed.

  The bleached-blonde kid from two doors down—one of an apartment full of white boy, wannabe rapper types, normally all sagging pants and scuffing saunter, now screamed from a fetal position as two of his roommates put the boot leather to him. It was brutal. The kid’s face was a smear of blood.

  "What the fuck are you assholes doing?" Cat asked, squaring with them.

  The kicking stopped. The kickers turned, panting, their eyes crazed. They grinned, mouths oozing green, and started toward Steve and Cat.

  Steve grabbed her arm. She shook it off and yelled down the hall. "You guys are in a lot of trouble!"

  The pair advanced, huffing and grinning. Steve just stood and stared, wondering what the hell they’d been into, all that green shit bubbling out of their mouths. From the sounds raging in all directions, it sounded like a lot of other people had gotten into the same shit. Further down the hall, a door banged open, and a fat kid, naked and splattered in crimson, came howling into the corridor, brandishing a long kitchen knife over his head.

  This time Steve grabbed hard and really jerked, and just in time. The kickers launched into a sprint. Steve had just enough time to pull Cat inside and th
row the locks before the crazies started hammering the door, slamming against it and jabbering like a pack of hyenas.

  Steve pulled her into his arms.

  "What’s going on?" she asked.

  "The whole world’s gone crazy." They stood, unspeaking, for half a minute, while the others beat at the door.

  Cat shuddered. "Why aren’t they saying anything?"

  Steve started to ask if she was deaf; these bastards were making a lot of noise, but then he understood, and the ramification of her words shuddered through him like an electrical current. The attackers screamed and howled and growled and beat their fists and threw their shoulders against the door, but neither spoke. No demands for entry, no threats, no cursing, nothing. Like animals.

  That’s what they’ve become, Steve thought. Wild animals.

  "Do you have a gun?" Cat asked.

  Steve shook his head.

  "Aren’t you supposed to be a drug dealer?"

  "This isn’t South Central, sweetheart, it’s College Heights. I hate guns."

  "Well, I’d sure like one now. Will they get through the door?"

  Steve shook his head. "No way." But inside, he wondered if that was true. The door was solid enough—metal, in a metal frame, with three locks—but these guys had gone completely out of their gourds.

  Gunfire sounded out the window. "Hit the lights," Steve said, crossing the room. "Let’s see what’s going on."

  Cat killed the lights. "Go away," she called through the door. "We’ve called the cops, you fucking psychos. They’ll be here any minute."

  More gunfire down below.

  Steve went to the window. A policeman stood atop the hood of the sports car, gun drawn. There was no sign of the lunatic with the tire iron, but Steve could see a girl in a yellow dress crouched behind a smashed Jeep, jerking her head side to side like a panicked rabbit. She leapt to her feet and beelined it down the street, away from the wreckage. Holding his pistol in both hands, the cop squared his shoulders, drew a bead, and fired. The shot knocked her out of her heels, and she lay face down on the pavement, looking very dead. The cop hopped off the cruiser, crossed the pavement in long strides to where she lay, picked her up, and laid her across one of the cars. He leaned over her, lifted her skirt, and…

  "Holy shit," Steve said again.

  The cop’s trousers dropped to his ankles, and he moved in against the woman.

  "Is he…raping her?"

  Well, Steve thought, first he killed her, now he’s fucking her. Is that rape?

  The cop thrust fast and hard against the still heap that had been a young woman. He raised his arm, still pumping away, and fired at something down the street, then holstered the pistol and used both hands to smash the head of the corpse repeatedly against the car.

  Steve’s heart was pounding. "All right," he said. He ran a hand through his hair. "All right, we’ve got to think."

  "At least the neighbors have gone away." The pounding outside had stopped.

  "Yeah. Makes it easier to think. Look. What do we know?"

  "People are killing people."

  "Right."

  "And we’re okay." She turned his chin toward her. "You are okay, right?"

  His laugh was nervous. "Yeah, I’m okay. Totally. You?"

  She nodded then hugged him. "I’m scared."

  He stroked her hair. "Me, too."

  "What’s causing this? What are we going to do?"

  "We’re going to sit tight," Steve said. "Keep the lights off and wait this thing out."

  "Got a TV?" she asked, looking around. "Maybe we can catch some news."

  Steve shook his head. "Got a radio, though."

  Overhead, it sounded like someone was going to stomp a hole through the ceiling.

  "Let’s check the radio," Cat said. "And what kind of weapons do you have? Just in case they, you know, do come through the door."

  Steve nodded. She was right. Be prepared. Like a couple of Boy Scouts…Boy Scouts on an acid trip. Maybe this whole thing really was a bad trip; maybe all these crazies dropped a bad batch of something, some drug that triggered psychosis. No. This was too big, too widespread. And a cop? Some cops might have a beer or two at the game before a night shift, but he didn’t think many used drugs, especially not on duty.

  His thoughts turned to weapons. "I’ve got a baseball bat," he said. "And some knives."

  She nodded, going to the butcher’s block near the fridge. "You’re really a disappointment as a drug dealer, you know," she said, smiling. "No guns, no TV, and a neat kitchen. Tea towels, even. What kind of a drug dealer has tea towels?"

  "I’m kind of a neat freak. The tea towels were a gift." Steve’s smile was genuine. Considering the circumstances, this pseudo-courting was all too surreal, but it made him like her even more. Not only was she hot as hell, she had guts, too, the girl in the middle of the apocalypse, making jokes about tea towels. A thinker, a girl who could take care of herself.

  Steve watched her pull the knives and set two aside. Then, looking up, she said, "You want any?"

  He shook his head. "I’ll stick to the bat."

  "Suit yourself." She opened a cabinet and dumped the knives she wasn’t using inside. "Probably best not to have these lying out in the open during a time like this."

  "Smart," he said, grabbing the bat.

  "Not all high school dropouts are idiots."

  There it is again, Steve thought, figuring if they spent any time together at all he was going to have to cut straight to the heart of that shit, drag it out into the light of day before it soured him on the whole girl. That would be a shame; there was so much to like.

  He watched her wrap a blade in a towel and tuck it into the lower pocket of her cargo pants. "Safety first."

  Steve laughed, watching with some disappointment as she pulled her shirt on. "I’ll miss the view," he said.

  "Tell you what," she said, "after things chill out, I’ll let you finish patting me down."

  "Sweet," he said.

  "Now where’s your radio?"

  They turned the volume low and ran through the channels. Music, music, bull’s-eye:

  "…some sort of riot going on here in Happy Heights, folks. My producer’s telling me that everything’s gone crazy outside. People are literally…" The announcer yelled to someone in the background, "I don’t give a shit. Get those doors locked. Now! Sorry, folks. We’ve got us a situation here, a genuine situation. Stick with us at WWCH, as we figure out just what the hell’s going on here." Then he was talking over his shoulder again, telling someone he wanted to take calls. "Again, we’re experiencing some kind of mass chaos. Line 2, you’re on."

  Sounding hysterical, the caller on line 2 explained in halting half-sentences how she and her friends were out on the street and then people were screaming and then somebody threw something big off one of the balconies —a gas grill, she thought—and then everything just went crazy, people going in and out of buildings, fighting each other, cars smashing into each other, and then down the street, somebody was shooting a gun!

  The announcer clipped her off with, "Hang in there and good luck," his voice so professionally chipper that Steve had to repress a slippery chuckle. This was just nuts.

  "Folks, we’re urging you stay indoors. Arm yourselves. This is not a joke. I’ll stay on the air as—what’s that?—my producer just told me one of the large apartment complexes down the street is afire. Which one? Gable Arms?"

  "That’s us," Steve said.

  Right on cue, the fire alarms screamed.

  "Shit," Cat said, looking wide-eyed at the door. "What do we do?"

  "We have to get out of here," Steve said. "I’ll take my chances with the crazies. Hold on." He rushed across the apartment, grabbed his baseball bat and backpack, then ran into his room, where he knelt inside the closet, pried out the fake panel, and started pawing drugs and cash into his backpack.

  "Hurry, Steve, I smell smoke!"

  Someone in the hallway was laughing like a maniac.
Grand, Steve thought, zipping the bag, and throwing it over his shoulders. It was a risk, taking the time to gather all of this, but there was no way he was letting it all go up in flames. Unfortunately, there wasn’t room for everything. With the pack full, bags of pot, foiled hash, and loose money still covered the closet floor. He called to Cat.

  "Whoa," Cat said, "you really are a drug dealer."

  Steve stuffed wads of cash into his pockets, then handed a fistful to Cat, saying, "Merry Christmas." The rest he left.

  The smell of smoke was thick now.

  "We better hurry," Cat said.

  Steve nodded.

  The smoke alarms seemed to agree.

  Cat went to the door, looked through the peephole, and groaned. "We’ve got trouble."

  Steve shouldered her gently aside to peer into the hall, where the naked fat kid was gouging long lines into the door opposite Steve’s.

  "This has to be quick," Steve said. He winced at the clacking of the locks then peered outside. A study in horror, the fat kid grinned as he hopped back and forth, his pale rolls jiggling, chest and face bloody, one hand gripping the bloody kitchen knife, the other jerking blood-slicked over a red erection.

  "He knows we’re coming," Steve said. "I’ll go at him, you stay behind me."

  Cat nodded. She held a knife in one hand and a small frying pan in the other. They heard the fat kid laughing outside.

  "On three," Steve said. They whispered the count in unison. On three, he flung the door wide and launched at the fat kid, who squealed with glee until the end of Steve’s bat jabbed him hard in the solar plexus and drove him into the opposite wall, where he slid to the ground, naked and jiggling and gasping for air.

  Steve swung the bat…and it smacked into the jam of the doorway. Steve’s hips followed through with the aborted swing, his shoulder jerked in the opposite direction, and the bat clattered free of his grip. He hadn’t moved forward out of the doorway before swinging. Stupid!

  The fat kid struggled onto all fours, laughing again. Steve sidestepped out the door and stooped for his bat.

  The kid threw his head back and roared with laughter, strands of bright green slime stretching between his lips, and lurched for Steve.