The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  Well, at least it wasn’t one of those ridiculous space suits you saw in films. With those ventilators that made you sound like Darth Vader himself. Those things just weren’t practical in the long run. For starters, most people couldn’t stand to be in them for more than twenty minutes. Walking coffins, they were. You could get PTSD just from spending a whole day in that contraption, never mind dealing with the effects of the disease. Add to that they were hellishly expensive, and difficult to come by after the borders closed up. The few still floating around were mostly used as fancy-dress props at therapy bars and such.

  Thinking about the stupid suit reminded her—she needed to buy duct tape. She was running out. Only had a month or so of tape left. She’d have to go to the market tomorrow. Sort it out. Best to take Ash along and buy a box or two. There were always issues with stock these days—the vendor she bought from sometimes didn’t have stock for weeks.

  Ash followed her through the garden towards the porch steps, where two Veeps were chatting to a gangly young paramedic about soccer scores.

  “What are we looking at?” Ash asked one of them, a short, round-faced guy with a big, ready smile, which seemed to turn upside down at the question.

  “Eish. It’s a bad one. Another one of those family suicides. Seems we’re getting them all the time now.”

  They found them in the bedroom. Four plastic cocoons. On the floor. Lying according to size, from large to small, like un-nested Russian dolls. Blood splattered every which way like some kind of fucked-up Rorschach test.

  Ash called in one of the patrollers and together they carted the smallest cocoon away. They’d been working together a long time, so he knew the deal. This job, they’d both seen things that would make others hurl their lungs out just thinking about it, but there was one thing Faith still couldn’t bear. If the grinners were younger than twelve, she couldn’t touch them, just couldn’t. Ash had to pick up the slack.

  So Ash did that and Faith stayed in the room with the dead. To the left of the biggest cocoon was a mirror. Someone, one of the cocoons probably, had taped a postcard above it. One of those island-vibe snaps with a cheesy palm tree: “Mauritius. Wish you were here.”

  Yes. That was it. It wasn’t just the anniversary. It was time. At age thirty-eight and three months, Faith September was planning her retirement.

  - 24 - SANS

  Sans left the café in a foul mood. It wasn’t even eight yet, but underneath the gloves his hands were wet with sweat. What the hell was up with this seesawing weather? The back of his hand was itching like a mother. He stuck a finger in one sleeve to scratch, but this only made it worse. For a second, he was tempted to take the damn things off. If you got caught barehanded in the street, the fine was high as fuck. And if you couldn’t pay, you were dragged off to the Island or the Flats. Nah, it wasn’t worth it—he’d have to suck it up.

  Up ahead, they were installing a new billboard: STAY ALIVE. DRINK BLACK HORSE BRANDY. The whole damn city was going up in flames, but these buy-buy eyesores still defiled every street corner, with every brand—from booze to coffee to condensed milk—claiming it could prevent you from catching the Joke. Cleaning products especially were selling like hotcakes. When the Down Days first came swinging, the government hired workers in plastic suits to spray the streets each week. Everyone was told to wash their hands with chlorine, disinfect with bleach. Within six months the shelves at your local shop were filled with new brands, plastic bottle after plastic bottle promising all sorts of miracle properties. Some people took the ads to heart, started cleaning like their salvation depended on it. A few suckers even started drinking diluted bleach, thinking it would cure them from the inside out. A Sanitation Church sprang up, declaring cleanliness to be godliness, redemption more attainable with each wash. Believers scrubbed their hands raw and succumbed all the same, but still the church grew. Today it had a huge zombie flock and headquarters in a shiny building in Long Street.

  Despite the heat and his itching skin, Sans was a man on a mission. He was heading to the Absa building, his hood’s signal sweet spot. He needed to start phoning everyone in his address book and then some—see if he could find Lucky. His head was down and his feet pounding the pavement. On the day this stretch of sidewalk had been cast, some sucker in a good mood with a need to make a mark had drawn a smiley face in the wet cement, locking the doodle into the pavement for all eternity. Normally, Sans just walked by, but today he looked down at the little gray face, where it lay smiling up at the sky forevermore, and took it personally. Slamming the soles of his sneakers into the smiley, he swore to himself and whoever else could hear. Maybe it was the alcohol fueling his fire, maybe it was the blinking, vibrating messages on his cell, but the honeymoon was really over now and he was feeling pretty pissed. He was sweating, he was angry, he felt like punching someone. But he had no one to punch, so he kept walking. Past pigeons, pimps, crazies, cocksuckers, suits, sinners, and street corner preachers. Sweat stinging his eyes, Rorschach blots blooming in his armpits. What was up with this heat?

  He was so deep inside his own head, he didn’t notice the pair of street rats angling his way. “Aweh, my laanie,” said the eldest kid, grabbing Sans by the elbow, while the younger rat trailed him like a tail. “Got some giggle porn, lip porn, tickle porn, some nice laughing gas for you. Good price today. Turn that frown upside down, ek sê!” While the older kid talked, the younger one kept his eyes on the street, scouting it up and down for virus patrollers.

  Normally, Sans was all for supporting young entrepreneurs, but his mood today was black and getting blacker by the minute. “Oh, fuck off before I call the Veeps,” he shouted.

  “Fokken piemp,” muttered the youngest, before the two little hustlers scattered.

  Sans kept walking. Walking. Towards the swarm of punters milling about in front of the new downtown therapy bar, jostling to get in.

  Wait.

  Was that . . . ?

  Did he just . . . ?

  A glint of his unicorn’s smooth black hair. Those fine pert shoulders that jutted back like wings. He pushed himself into the heart of the swarm.

  “Hey, guy! Watch it!” he heard someone gripe.

  “Asshole,” muttered another.

  The eye of the crowd smelt like sweat and beer and stale smoke. Limbs pushed and rubbed and poked. Sweat melded with sweat. Sans had this weird feeling that he was going to drown. He arched his neck up high, pushed his elbows out, and spun around. But he couldn’t see her anywhere. His unicorn was gone.

  Then something weird started happening. Something that blew his brain. The crowd was growing eerily quiet. Like someone was turning the volume down. And the bodies surrounding him were melting away like mist.

  What’s worse, there was this wet puddle on the ground, like someone had spilt their beer on the pavement. But something wasn’t quite right with it.

  It was growing. Expanding. Morphing. Into. Something. Someone.

  His unicorn? No. Not her, no. This chick was younger, just a barefoot kid, no more than five or six. Then he heard something weird, like waves in the ocean, roaring and rolling and crashing. Seagulls, too. And mixed in with that a strange creaking sound, floorboards maybe. The specter was eyeing him up like Gandhi, finding him wanting, but as he looked at her, her face changed, distorted into fuck knows what. There were flowers growing out of her eyes now, white creepers, and animals, all kinds, climbing out of her nostrils, and strange old buildings, white, miniature, falling out of her mouth and tumbling to the ground like dominoes.

  Then the wave came. Washed over him. Not a metaphorical one, but an actual spraying, braying, whirling, roaring, splashing, crashing, wet, angry wave. A cold ocean monster with snaking wet tendrils that slammed him to the floor in pain. He was drowning. Sinking, sinking. Into a white. Bright. Blank. Light.

  A shot of Technicolor.

  A flash of limbs, skirts, sneakers.

  He was coming up for air.

  Gasping for breath.

 
; A crowd of faces were staring down at him on the sidewalk.

  “You okay, dog?” someone asked. A boy in a hoodie, earphones curled around his neck.

  “What was that?” someone else said. “Some kind of stroke?”

  “No. I . . . I’m fine.”

  The boy in the hoodie looked at him. Frowned. “My cousin has epilepsy,” he said.

  “No, really. I’m good.”

  He pushed his way through the circle of bodies—past a tall guy hugging a blue sports bag and a woman with pink-streaked hair—into the hot, blinding street. He walked away as fast as he could without downright running. Didn’t want to look too spooked. But his face felt flushed and his damn hands shook. What a total tit. What the hell was wrong with him? Could it be some kind of response to stress, his money woes messing with his head? Kind of like what had happened to his mother when that guy stepped into her office and shot himself. Or maybe it was the good old evil eye or some bad juju he’d picked up, not that he believed in that stuff.

  Sweet mother, it had better not be the Bug.

  Somehow, he felt that the whole damn thing came back to that chick. He was doing fine before he met that bloody cherry. That bloody, beautiful cherry. That lay was bad, bad, beautiful luck. Hey, maybe she used some bad muthi on him? Laid a curse on him or worse—slipped a paste of ground-up pigeon hearts into his beer to make him fall in love with her? Whoa. Here he was again, talking about evil eyes and all that, when he didn’t believe in that hocus-pocus stuff.

  Not only was he running out of time to find Lucky before his suppliers smelt a rat, but he was going all cuckoo’s nest to boot. No. There wasn’t time to screw around. He had to get his head straight.

  Get ahold of yourself, he told himself. She’s just a girl. A girl with perfect Pantene hair. Unicorn hair. But a girl nonetheless. Fuck.

  A few feet in front of him, an informal waste recycler was clattering his trolley over the cracked sidewalk while muttering the same two sentences over and over: “I’m gonna get you, you son of a gun. You mother-effing son of a gun.” For a moment Sans imagined what the streets would sound like if everyone else could just get dead already. Would it bring some kind of absolution? Or would he be driven mad by the sound of his own echoing footsteps? The recycler ground his trolley to a halt in front of a mushrooming trash can and started sifting through it. The outside of the can was plastered with some star soccer player’s ugly mug. Underneath it, a cheesy government slogan: BE A CHAMP. CHECK YOUR TEMP. Sans’s pocket vibrated. Then it vibrated again. He checked the screen. Thirty unread messages.

  “I’m gonna get you, you son of a gun. You mother-effing son of a gun,” the recycler rattled once more with his head deep inside the maw of the can. With nothing around to plug the cracks, the dam swelling inside Sans burst with a bang. “Shut up! Just shut the hell up, why don’t you!” he screamed, balling up an angry fist and kicking the trash can soccer player right on his smug A4 mug.

  - 25 - TOMORROW

  At the sound of the front door opening, Tomorrow woke up. She lifted her head from the kitchen table. It was Ayanda, and his new bae. She couldn’t remember the little glue-sniffer’s name. The pair of them were giggling hysterically, which was totally against the rules but probably didn’t mean anything sinister—just that they were wasted. She listened as they made their way down the passage. Heard the key turn in the bedroom lock. The sound of music piping up. “Hold up, they don’t love you like I love you,” Queen Bey’s husky voice crooned through the door.

  Tomorrow stood up and stretched. Her foot, which had been tucked underneath her, was heavy and useless with sleep. Her eyelids were thick, and her tongue felt as though it were stuck like sticky tape to the roof of her mouth. She hadn’t slept at all the night before, waiting and waiting for the cop to phone and say they’d found Elliot, and then Lucky’s boss arriving and surprising her like that, reeking of booze and looking for Lucky and offering to give her a haircut. Where was Lucky anyway?

  In the sink she found a semi-clean cup. She filled it with water and slathered some leftover cooking fat onto a bread crust while the radio blabbered in the background. She didn’t remember turning it on last night. She half-caught the tail end of a conversation between the DJ and some old lady caller phoning in to moan about the state of things.

  “Who wouldn’t be afraid of dying?” the woman was saying at a pitch that put Tomorrow’s teeth on edge. “With all the online funerals I’ve been going to. I mean, it feels like there’s one every weekend. It’s damn right almost illegal to go to a funeral in person now, thanks to that minister—the one with the poodle hair, I always forget her name, D-something. Not that I want to, mind you, go in person, I mean. Too risky, all those bodies pressed together around one grave.

  “Anyway, I’ve got my good black dress pressed and ready all the time now, because we’re going to so many of the darned things. My husband as well, with his shirt, tie, and jacket hanging from the closet door ironed and ready to go. Not pants, though. He doesn’t need the suit pants. Says why should he, if no one can see his bottom part with the camera. Anyway, so many funerals. That’s if the power’s not out and the generator isn’t on the fritz . . .” Tomorrow let the sound of her chewing the crust drown out the woman. Her thoughts returned to Elliot.

  Detectives always said in movies when children got lost that the first twenty-four hours were crucial. After that, the chances of finding the kid alive . . . She glanced at the clock. Elliot had been missing for twenty-two hours. Another two left. One hundred and twenty minutes. Seven thousand two hundred seconds.

  She checked her phone. No bars. She slipped on her sandals, grabbed her keys and phone, and headed to the door. Down the passage, all was quiet. Ayanda and his girlfriend were probably sleeping.

  Tomorrow locked the front door and hurtled down the steps. She hurried up the street towards the mountain and Schotsche Kloof. The day was still in diapers, but the suburb’s signal sweet spot was already swamped with bodies, all milling around, cells to ears. She cupped her hand over the screen to check for bars. Yes. A whole row of them. No messages from the cops, though. Of course.

  She stuck her hand in her hoodie pocket and rooted around for the torn scrap of Truth she’d stashed there earlier. Finding it, she unwrapped the wrinkly paper ball and smoothed it out against the wall with her fingers, blackening the tips with ink. There. That’s better. She read the words out again, whispering it aloud to herself as it were some kind of magical mantra. Or a spell to fix everything.

  “F. September. TRUTHOLOGIST.”

  - 26 - FAITH

  The parking lot by the sea was just about empty. While dispatch did their thing, Ash snoring next to her, Faith flattened Tuesday’s Truth on her lap. She chewed on the back of a pencil as she paged through it. The front page carried an article about money falling from the sky in Bree Street. Two pages on, she found an article about the death of a known drug dealer who had been found murdered on the roof of an abandoned office block in the same street, along with an unidentified teenage male. She circled both articles, folded up the paper, and placed it on the dashboard.

  The sky was still gray but the air felt hot and sticky. After yesterday’s unseasonal howling gale, which was supposed to clean Sick City out, the weather hadn’t improved much. It was turning into a miserable day. She looked towards the lighthouse, where an old woman was hugging a street pole as the wind tore at her skirt. A Good Samaritan was trying to give the windswept woman a hand, but the stubborn old thing was refusing to let go of the pole.

  There was a coffee stall across the road. Faith picked up her coat from the floor of the passenger side. It had an Ash-sized footprint on the back. She cursed herself for leaving the coat in stepping position. She put it on, footprint and all, and climbed out of the minibus. She locked the door behind her and headed across the road.

  A one-legged man in period costume was leaning against the lighthouse wall. “Lovely day, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” sa
id Faith.

  “Say, I haven’t seen you around these parts before.”

  “That makes two of us. I haven’t seen you here before, either.”

  “Strange,” said the man. “But never mind. We’ve met now. I’m the lighthouse keeper.” The man tipped his old-school hat. “West, Daddy West.”

  Faith nodded, then walked on and joined the bleary-eyed queue of people waiting for a caffeine fix. A crowd was starting to form around the old woman attached to the pole, who was mouthing them all off, sailor-style.

  She was watching the drama unfold from the safety of the queue when she heard her phone pipe up. She couldn’t remember when she’d heard it ring last. The stupid thing almost never had a signal (and most people preferred to text now anyways). She fished it out of her bag, fumbled with the sliding mechanism.

  “Hello?”

  “Are you the truthologist?”

  “Sorry?”

  “F. September. I’m looking for F. September?” The voice on the other end of the line seemed small, unsure.

  “Um . . . yes, this is she.”

  “I’m calling about the ad you placed in the Daily Truth.”

  * * *

  Faith had felt a bit stupid when she’d first placed the ad. It was Lawyer’s idea. “You have a gift,” he told her. “It would be wrong not to use it.”

  “Why don’t I just write for the Truth, like you?” She’d laughed.

  “You can. But you would hate it, wouldn’t you? The truth is too important to you. I mean the real truth. Whatever that means. It’s just semantics to me. I don’t really care either way. What I do, you see, has nothing to do with the truth. I just give people options. It’s up to them to choose what to believe. You can do that, too, sure, and you’ll be real good at it, but it won’t be enough. Not enough for you. And not enough for your gift.”

  “There you go again, talking about my hunches like they’re something supernatural. There’s nothing supernatural about a hunch. It’s just dumb luck, really, when I get something right.”