Kzine Issue 20

by Graeme Hurry et al.

  She spends a few moments outside, wandering around, but never too far from her shack. Wander in this milky thickness and you are sure to die, for the mist reaches forever in every direction.

  Everything she hears is muffled, everything she sees veiled. She spends a few moments looking for her marking-sticks – perhaps she will go to Beta’s house, or Gamma’s. But nobody, today, for she cannot find the sticks, and is suddenly certain that the man, the colossal hairy cuckoo now probably eating her dinner, has uprooted them and flung them away for his own malign purposes. She goes back around the front and storms in, knife-first.

  The man is sitting where she has left him; he is using a knife to pare away the dead skin on his feet. He is using one of her rags to rub something on them, some concoction of crushed greens and water. Semiliquid and chunky like herbivore vomit.

  He doesn’t look up.

  “What did you do to my sticks?”

  “Nothing,’ says the man.

  “Well then, where are they?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You took them out! Why did you take them out?”

  And then he looks at her, again, and she realizes that he is weary, and also possessed of something else. Something heavy and bewildering, like grief. She cannot tell but nor can she believe that this monster would ever feel something so human.

  “I didn’t take them out,” he says, slowly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He goes back to tending to his feet.

  Alpha slowly makes her way back to her pot, keeping her eyes on him. There are more coals in the fire now, and a small plastic bag full of them sitting in the corner. And a potato, too, old and a little shriveled but edible nonetheless. One look and her stomach rumbles.

  When she looks back up, the man is staring at her.

  “I’m not going to rape you.”

  “What?”

  “I said, I’m not going to rape you.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Isn’t that what you’re afraid of? I don’t want you to freak out.”

  She laughs. “Freak out? Big stinking oaf walks into my house and starts chopping up his feet and I can’t freak out? Why should I believe you?”

  “Doesn’t make a difference what you believe.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m not going to rape you, either way. And I’m sharing my potato with you.”

  Alpha realizes she is still holding the knife.

  “I’ve one spoon. You’ll just have to improvise.”

  The man fishes around in his vast coat and eventually fishes out a bright red oval. He fiddles with it for a moment, and teases out a small spoon, winking silver-red in the coal-light. Alpha’s eyes widen.

  “Is that a Swiss army knife? Where did you get that?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Can I see?”

  The man shakes his head, puts the device away. “No. It’s mine.”

  “Just let me look.”

  “No.”

  “Dick.”

  The man shrugs.

  Alpha stirs the pot with a single chopstick. Little streaks of oil and flecks of starch swirling between the bubbles. She pulls it out, and with a guilty glance at the man plunges it into her mouth. Hot and nearly flavourless. It is good enough.

  “What’s your name?” she asks.

  “Omega.”

  “Omega?”

  “Yes. Omega.”

  “Just Omega?”

  “Just Omega.”

  “What is that, a codename or something?”

  “It’s not a codename. It’s my name.”

  “It’s a stupid name.”

  “Is yours any better?”

  “Miles.”

  “What is it?”

  And Alpha realizes she cannot remember her name. Or rather, she cannot remember any name other than Alpha; and Alpha, patently, is stupider than Omega.

  “Alpha,” she says, quietly.

  The man smiles. Even his teeth are vast, great slabs of ivory framed with golden-brown plaque. “Alpha?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s it? Alpha? How is that any better than Omega?”

  Alpha says nothing, and keeps stirring. After a while, the man guffaws, and hauls himself to his feet. Alpha notices a tattoo on one foot – a trident, or a fork – and that his right little toe is missing.

  “So your sticks lead to Beta’s house and Gamma’s house, right?”

  “How do you know that? You know Beta and Gamma?”

  The man is pulling on his boots. They are too small for him, Alpha sees, and the effort of squeezing them on makes him puff and turns his face red. He heads for the door, and opens it. For a few moments, he is a silhouette against the swirling whiteness outside, the one defined thing in a world bereft of form or clarity.

  “I’ve known all of you forever,” he says, stepping out, and closes the door behind him.

  * * *

  The first thing she hears when she wakes up is a roar. She panics, thinking some wild animal has crawled into her shack, and leaps to her feet. It must be day; she can see the glowing milkiness of the world outside through cracks in the wall. But there is no animal in there with her. Only the vast bulk of Omega, curled up in a corner, snoring.

  She decides to step outside. Her direction-sticks are back in place and strung between them are strings. One of these heading off to the right to Beta’s, the other straight ahead to Gammas. Once there were three, she remembers, but no one visits Delta anymore.

  That bastard, Delta.

  Perhaps she will visit Beta. See if he has seen that strange character hanging around outside his shack again. Beta is full of visions, and rumours, and gossip, though as far as Alpha knows he knows no one else but her and Gamma. And maybe Delta. And possibly this Omega.

  There are times when she doesn’t mind the mist. Especially when it is daytime and warm, when the obscured sun imbues it with gold and she can just about feel the warmth on her skin. This must be what it is like to swim, she thinks, and then wonders if she ever has. Yes, she decides, for after some effort a few memories float up from the depths of her memory. A beach; a child, holding a plastic bucket; a boat, tilted sideways, deck-chairs sliding hither and thither. Thus is her memory, as fragmentary and ghostly as the sounds she sometimes hears emanating from the white murk.

  She realizes with a start that she has been following the sticks to Beta’s for longer than seems right. She stops for a few moments, breathing hard. So thick is the fog that she cannot even see her own feet. Like she were some apparition. Like she herself were only half-formed, semi-solid and delicate like the wispy tendrils of white that seem to crowd about her as if they were sentient.

  The panic passes; she resumes her journey. Why did he not just kill her in the night, she wonders. Why would he have bothered tying these strings to her sticks? She keeps going, and thinking, and suddenly Beta’s hut looms in front of her. A ragtag thing shambolic and shuttered and slowly listing to one side as if exhausted of existing.

  The door is open.

  “Beta?” she says.

  The door must have been open a while; the mist has leaked in, heavy as the night, and pooled on the ground. It is bright inside; all of Beta’s candles and lamps, so carefully hoarded, are lit, in a great circle on the ground. To the left, the shattered remains of a bed. To the right, a table, smashed in half. A blow of tremendous strength, it must have been, for there at splinters everywhere. Things strewn about – a pair of red tights, muddy and torn and a few pages from a magazine and a pair of scissors, crusted with rust, dull jaws agape.

  She sees Beta. He is lying in the middle of the circle of lamps, naked but for his underwear. He is lying face-up—or rather, he would have been, if he still had a face—and his blood has drained into his back and turned purple. She thinks he looks like some strange statue, his skin so white, his hands so still, and the rot setting into his flesh so vivid. Nothing but a red mess where h
is head should be. Shards of bone, white and dagger-sharp, lie scattered about the place.

  Beta draws closer; when the stench hits her, she bends over and retches. Halfway through her second heave, she hears someone.

  “Messy, ain’t it?”

  She screams, and jumps back; but it is only Gamma – shriveled little Gamma, wrapped up like a mummy, waddling forwards from some cranny of the hut where she had been gorging herself on one of Beta’s jams. She peers suspiciously at Alpha, a gaze so intense that Alpha can almost feel it on her, so intense that when those eyes drop from her neck to her bosom to her crotch to her feet she has the urge to cover herself up and hide, though she is clothed and knows she has nothing to fear.

  “What happened?”

  “It weren’t you,” says Gamma, and coughs violently. “And it weren’t me.”

  “Oh yeah? How do you know?”

  “His head, love. You think I’d manage that with these little feet? You think you could with yours?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t feet.”

  But it was, Alpha realizes, judging from the thing-that-was-once-Beta’s-head. The boot-shaped hollows amidst the viscera. The red boot-prints near the body. How had she not noticed that?

  “Gimme some!” she says, reaching for the jam.

  Gamma holds the jar to her chest. Her fingers smeared with the red stuff as if she had been digging around inside the body between them with her bare hands.

  “No.”

  “Share.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Beta did.”

  Gamma chuckles, and lifts one lapel of her coat. Alpha hears the clinking in her pockets of more bottles, sees the scraps Gamma has collected – a bag of bottle tops, a shriveled old finger on a chain, a tiny stuffed owl missing most of its feathers. It stares at Alpha, dead-eyed and immobile.

  “You wanna fight me, you little whore?”

  “Hey!”

  “I saw him. That big fella. Sneaking into yours last night.”

  “What?”

  “I was followin’ ’im.”

  “Why?”

  “Mighty suspicious, don’t you think? To turn up like that, out of nowhere? Come to mine, he did, first. But I reckon I couldn’t offer him what you could.” Gamma runs her tongue over cracked old lips.

  “What did he say? Was he looking for me?”

  “Sure as shit he was. Where’s Alpha, he says. Just walks into my place. Says he thought it were your place. He’s lucky I didn’t poke him one.”

  “As if you could, you old hag.”

  Gamma frowns, and shuffles up to Alpha, and Alpha can smell her and she smells of death.

  “Nice boots he had,’ she says. “Nice big boots.”

  Then, with a glance at Beta’s body, she is gone.

  Alpha wants to call after her but she cannot speak. She cannot move. She stares at those huge foot prints, imagines Omega in this shack. His head grazing the roof. His great fists smashing the table, dragging poor old Beta from his bed. Throwing him to the floor like he were firewood. Then smashing him, smashing him with that boot, crushing that kind old face over and over and the sound of bone crunching and brain splattering.

  She feels sick, and throws up again. She thinks of returning home, and then she sits and cries. It does not feel like very long, but soon the sun starts to set and the candles to sputter out, and she realizes she must head back or stay here with Beta. Half blinded by the mist and the tears, she ransacks his house – a pair of socks, clumsily darned with hemp-string; a handless pan; some old biscuits, too hard for Gamma’s toothless gums. The scissors, blades rough and flaky to the touch and stinking mildly of rust. But she pays that no mind.

  Let him get close, she thinks. Then plunge them into his neck. Twice, if you can. If the blood-loss doesn’t get him, the tetanus will.

  On the way back, she wonders what tetanus is.

  * * *

  Afterwards, she cannot stop shaking. At first she just stands there, her teeth clattering, and stares down at Omega. The scissors fall to the floor. She takes a step back, then another. Slowly she makes it to her bed, and collapses into it and weeps. Omega watches her for a while and when he is certain she is spent he gets to his feet and closes the door tightly and lights another candle. There is no breeze, yet the flame sputters and flickers.

  Alpha is still sobbing, her face buried in her grimy hands. So many tears that they are dripping off her face. Clear gold in the candlelight. Omega walks past her, to her little stash of cans in the corner. He chooses one, and lights a fire.

  “What’re you doing?” she asks, voice quivering.

  “Cooking.”

  “Don’t use that.”

  Omega looks at the can. It has no label. None of her cans do.

  “Why not?”

  “That’s for special occasions.”

  “How do you know which one it is?.”

  “I know. That one’s pork. I marked it.”

  He puts it back, and picks up another one and looks at her. She is wiping her tears away, smudging the lines of clean skin they’d carved through the grime on her face. She looks at the can, and nods.

  “I found some carrots today,” says Omega, reaching into his pocket and pulling out two small orange cones. “You should have a big meal. You’ve had a shock.”

  She sniffs.

  He kindles the fire and adds coals and empties the contents of the can – beans in red sauce, each a glossy little egg - into the handleless pan. He slices the carrots straight in with his army knife and waits for it to heat up. The smell of tomatoes, sweet and dense. When he looks up, Alpha is sitting with her knees drawn up to her chin, her arms around her shins, staring at his boots.

  “You can check them again, if that’ll make you feel better,” he says.

  She doesn’t say anything for a while. And then: “He was just so nice. He was the nicest thing here. He shared stuff with me. He helped me when I was cold.” She points to her foot-wrappings. “I stepped on some thorns once. So he made me these.”

  Omega nods, and stirs the beans, and says nothing.

  “Do you remember?” says Alpha.

  “Remember what?”

  “Before. Before all this.”

  “A few things.”

  “Like what?”

  Omega taps the stirring-chopstick on the side of the pot, and balances it across the rim. “Skyscrapers. The sun glinting off windows, really high up. The sky. It was blue, and wide, and full of things. The sun, the moon. Stars.”

  “I remember a beach. Do you know what a beach is?”

  Of course I do, he wants to say. But instead he lies. “No.”

  “And a child. A little boy.” She starts crying again. “I miss him. How can I miss him if I don’t even know who he is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Alpha lies down, arms still wrapped around herself.

  “It must have been Delta,” she says. “Delta’s a bastard.”

  “Why?”

  She is silent so long that he thinks perhaps she has fallen asleep; but then she says, “I don’t know. I just know. He’s a bastard. A murderer.”

  The beans are hot now; the sauce seethes like lava in a volcano. Omega blows out the fire, and digs out a small cracked saucer. He doles out a few spoonsful of the stuff. It steams gloriously in the twilight.

  “Sometimes,” says Alpha quietly. “Sometimes I think this is purgatory, you know? Like, where all the unbaptized babies go. This must be purgatory, right? Because there’s nothing here but you and me and them and stuff left over. What do you think it’s left over from, Omega?”

  Omega puts a few more spoonsful of beans on the saucer, and fishes out a few pieces of carrot and puts those on top too, and holds the saucer out to her with one hand and his swiss army knife with the other and tries his best to smile.

  “Eat,” he says. And eat she does, small mouthfuls at first, and then two or three big ones, and the saucer is empty. He fills it again and hands it back.

/>   “But what about you?”

  “Plenty left for me.”

  She holds his gaze for a few seconds, and then looks at the ground. “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “Don’t be. You’d never have hurt me anyhow.”

  She looks back up, and for a long moment their eyes lock. Then Omega spoons a mouthful of beans straight into his mouth from the pot and looks away. After a while he hears Alpha place the saucer on the floor and lie down. And a while after that he hears her breath slow, and deepen. And then he cleans the pots and the spoons and the saucer, and goes back to his corner, and watches her sleep until the candle finally burns itself out and the flame flickers and dies.

  * * *

  The mist makes it easy to forget. This obscuring thing of invincible inertia. Occasional phantoms may disrupt it, and errant gusts set it a-swirling, but always it returns to its natural state.

  All-smothering, like Cronus to Gaia.

  Alpha gets used to Omega’s presence, and then, slowly, she even grows to like it. He is quiet and always near, but never close. Weighed it seems by some unfathomable grief that sets him a-staring at the dinnertime flame and, sometimes, when he thinks she does not notice, at her. He goes to Beta’s house, for she cannot stand to, and ransacks it. Sixteen cans of unlabeled tin cans of food and a pair of shoes too big for Alpha and too small for him and piles of newspapers for bedding and flame. He scavenges too, disappearing for hours into the white. Sometimes he comes back with a few vegetables and sometimes he comes back empty-handed and offers her a thin smile before insisting he cook, as penance.

  One day, he returns with some wood and spends some time carving a rough handle – painful work with his blunt Swiss army knife, work that drives splinters into the calloused skin of his hands, but he does not seem to mind. He frowns as he concentrates and his tongue – bright pink like a worm – sticks out of the corner of his mouth. Eventually he takes some of Alpha’s used tin cans and crushes and stomps them into a rough blade. He makes a cut at the top of the handle, inserts it, and binds it with some nylon string Alpha had scavenged a few days earlier.

  “A spear,” he says, handing it over to her.

  Alpha looks at it, and then at him. “What for?”