PostApoc

by Liz Worth

  You’d think no one has anything to hide anymore, but there are still pills, secret stashes, hidden connections not everyone wants to share.

  This is how we live: either constantly on edge or constantly on the edge of oblivion. Some of us are like Cam, who’s been on his own since his first foster home, or like Aimee, who has only ever mentioned her dead father once, her mother left unacknowledged. Myself, I spent years perfecting the art of thinking of my parents solely as a source of income and annoyance, blanking out my brother. How I live now is I don’t tell anyone that my work is unraveling, that as we’ve stopped wondering the hows and whys of what’s happening around us, today, I can’t stop myself from wondering what’s happening to them.

  This is how we live: believing this end is a slow grind. We pick at the wet skin of lips, a miscarriage of nutrients. Eyelashes prod my tear ducts; I pluck them away and they turn to earwigs, mascara nightmares between my nails.

  I will not move today. The lifeless grey meat Aimee cooked yesterday had its claws out, kept me on my knees all night. It was something Cam, our self-proclaimed hunter, had brought in, either killed on the street or found dead already. A cat, probably. There are hundreds of them out there.

  Middle of the night I went outside to sweat it out, spit it up. We only have warm rainwater to drink, collected in pails on the back steps. Sand sifts at the bottom of each bucket, silt against teeth.

  My mouth is raw red and vile but I can’t stomach the grit of the water right now. Two more days until the next rations are handed out, if we’re lucky.

  I’m the only one with a sick gut. Unless the rest of them aren’t showing it, better at finding privacy than I am.

  This is how we live: barely, it feels. Survival strung together with the small thread of authority left in this city, no one implementing rules because there’s nothing to save, and not enough of a population to police. We expect every care package to be our last, don’t even ask questions when we pick it up, just take what we can, add it all to our small stockpiles of salvaged batteries, scavenged items looted from hollowed out convenience stores, the rubbing alcohol and antiseptic creams we’ve taken from abandoned houses.

  Aimee’s up, her body a pink silhouette in the corner of my eye. She says something but the bedroom’s too hot for me to even breathe in so I move to the bathroom without answering her, press myself against the bare tub, seeking a cool surface.

  Someone’s hung up shower curtains, cloudy clear plastic with black polka dots. Optimism, maybe, that we’ll be able to squeeze a shower or two out of the taps one of these days. You never know. The grid seems to flicker on and off, out of nowhere. Anything can happen.

  There’s a clanging of metal from the mudroom at the back of the house, blending with the chainsaw of runny lungs. Must be Cam or Trevor, who are constantly bringing back things they find in the streets, along with illnesses. Sickness is always running through this house, runs through the city still.

  “Bikes.”

  It’s the only word I can hear through the bathroom floor. The guys raise their pitch when they say it, excited. They’ve been picking them up all over the place, they said. Just cutting the locks and taking them. Not likely that anyone will come looking for them.

  From downstairs, Aimee’s maple voice asks: “Where we gonna ride them to?” My head is swimming too much to tap into recognition patterns. Another wave of cramps passes through my abdomen and I don’t hear the answer, just close my eyes. Hope to sleep past the pain.

  A few hours of half-sleep and the space where the ache was has been filled with what I hope are slivers of hunger. Downstairs, Cam’s showing off a find of thirty boxes of packaged cakes and donuts looted from the waste bin behind a warehouse west of downtown they found when they went out riding earlier. The boxes are all marked expired but the cakes are still soft in their sealed plastic, no mold. Good enough. Better than the dried beans and maggoty rice in the kitchen.

  All afternoon, the crush and snap of plastic wrapping torn open runs parallel to the tears in every roll of my stomach. I can only eat a bite of vanilla, something soft and bland enough to keep down.

  - 8 -

  A SÉANCE OF WHITE NOISE

  The electricity weaves us with black and white. Cuts in and out, unpredictable but enough to let us have something, to give us what we really need.

  We all ride together from the Victorian, pull up outside the charred shell of what used to be the Mission, a pack of clanging chains and steel toe tension, thin red bandanas tied to pale ankles. The marquee has held on, hangs empty, but we don’t need it to tell us why we’re here. We have messages written on windows, word of mouth, longing and intuition. There aren’t as many people outside as I was expecting. The building is hollowed out, becoming an unholy structure, its ceiling blasted by flames.

  Cam says he heard the band’s worried that they might not get through their whole set, not sure how much electricity there is. It could all be blown out by their amps.

  Someone wonders out loud if this is the best idea, if we should save the energy for something else. Everyone groans, throws stony faces towards the question. What else is there if we can’t have one more show? Besides, Cam points out, the power cuts in and out anyway. No one’s got a rein on it no matter what you use it for.

  Me and Aimee stare hard at the few kids out here: a girl with silver eyes and a face so freckled it looks tan. Her mouth is small and hard and the spiked dog collar around her neck is too loose. The two guys she’s with could be the same person: shaved heads, complexion made of paste. I don’t know any of them. If they know we’re checking them out they don’t act like it. Don’t even look at us. They adjust their weight every few seconds. Dusty plastic capsules crunch under their heels. The sound of snail shells.

  Grayline. Another mumble from Cam. Keeping his voice low, he tells us that people want to know how to get it, what it is. The story is that grayline’s a drug made from the shake of magic mushrooms and the ashes of the dead. That crematoriums have been pillaged to make it. Cam adds cryptically, “I know where to get some.”

  Me and Aimee used to know where to get everything but now we’re behind, relying on Cam more than we’d like to. Unlike Trevor’s, Cam’s eyes hold a hardness that betrays any softening expressions in his face. Aimee says one of her half-brothers knew Cam for a while, that he had a reputation for paranoia and the ability to go from calm to vicious with nothing more than a glance from across the room. Twice now I’ve heard Cam talk about how he spent his sixteenth birthday in jail for beating the crap out of another kid for reasons that are only ever vaguely explained.

  We hover around him anyway, waiting on his word.

  “Can you tell us where?” Aimee asks, but Cam just shakes his head, enjoying this power he has. Instead of saying anything, he unrolls his fist and holds three capsules up, one for each of us. We break them open, pour the grayline on our tongues like Cam shows us, and wait for the show to start.

  Aimee offers the last drag of her cigarette. Another thing that probably won’t last much longer. Every pack we’ve been given has been stale. Probably old smokes that were sitting around in some warehouse for years. No point in complaining. Soon we’ll forget what fresh cigarettes taste like. I kill the smoke, drop it, put it out with the toe of my boot. A green sticker in the shape of a star is stuck to the sidewalk. One of its glittering points is peeling upwards, reaching for sky.

  Inside Cam disappears and Trevor comes up to us right away, his hair in his eyes and his face too close to mine. The toes of his shoes jam into the front of my boots. He holds his hand up to us the way people offer food to an animal.

  He asks if we want some more. I look to Aimee to answer but she’s already reaching in, helping herself, so I do the same, not mentioning that I can already feel Cam’s dose working through me.

  “Thanks,” we say, cracking the plastic caps open and pouring the contents onto our tongues. In our mouths, it cakes into a dry dust, doesn’t work itself into paste but i
nstead goes down like grit. Saliva glands pump liquid but it only spreads the granules high up into my gums.

  This must be what death tastes like. Trevor just nods, watches us work it all down our throats as he brushes hair back from his forehead with his whole hand. Trevor’s t-shirt is slit below the armpit, thin cotton fighting long underarm hairs.

  Grayline. I would have thought it was just sand if it wasn’t for the physical click, distinct and muscular, a strobe light through my arms and legs. Across the room a couple of people are putting up missing persons posters: friends and parents, a couple of cousins. The words are written in red nail polish, faded marker, black electrical tape. I wonder how many posters it took before the ink ran out of those people’s pens.

  Each rectangle that gets stuck to the wall throbs out towards me as I pass by, puffing out paper bellies to show me their secrets, hidden messages spelling out the night’s song list, translating into bending steel strings, margins blotting into fret boards.

  White Doom aren’t going on for another hour but I can already feel them, hear them. They’re pulling me in, tentacles of reverb wrapped around nerves, sucking my hangnails, scraping circles around my gooseflesh. Another poster throbs into a bass line, water witching with the majority of flesh, my liquid foundation.

  Aimee is stealing my breath with every word she’s saying, the word thirteen coming out of her mouth so many times that it’s growing into 13+13=26+13=39+13=52+13=65 and on and on.

  The Mission is hundreds of feet of black gravity, too deep for the eyes to adjust. I light a match, but burn the tips of my thumb and finger one step later. When I get back into the light I will see that it’s left a dark brown bubble of sulfur and body water on my skin.

  White Doom take the stage surrounded by small bodies. I am thirty seconds behind everybody else, having now created my own time. The band did not start on my schedule. They open with “Omen/coincidence.” The first bars don’t come from the band, but instead come to the band through us, our bodies mere vessels so that this one night might happen, the light of the low stars a gift we draw from to power these instruments and fingers and voices, not a song but a reversal of ruin that brings us back from the dead, gives us witch-name initials and brands them into our retinas.

  We form a triple circle, guided by subconscious subversions, natural rhythms and the shadow hands of conjured spectres, a primary sacrament with our hands cupped into scrying bowls. A girl falls and her dive breaks the inner circle, making her an altar of truth. We all follow.

  White Doom spiral into “White Cat” but I must be in a trance, must actually be inside the songs instead of in front of them, because when you get inside there is no distinguishing one song from the next. This band is reducing us all to a single consciousness, a new collective consciousness, and right now I do believe that this is the culmination of everything we’ve been dying for, that this moment is the whole point of The End and everyone here, that we are the lucky ones, the ones that are crossing over.

  A boy with neon nail polish grabs the tops of my arms. His hands are made of babies’ bones and wrapped in skin as thin as tissue paper. He pulls me down with him to pray: I need you I need you I need you. He must have seen that I’m the one here who really understands those words.

  But then another voice overrides his and puts communion into my head, just as cascades of feedback spill onto the floor around us. The band sits on the floor, too, staring down, waiting for the right time to kick the fuzz into a semblance of a song. A few girls sit on the band’s amps, arms around each other, their faces beacons of adoration. This is all we have.

  All we ever had, I answer.

  - 9 -

  COMEDOWN

  Watching dregs of web in the tub, waiting for the grayline comedown to kick in. Cam didn’t mention this shit would last so long.

  The spiders work over the taps, all the way up to the dank angle where the walls turn into ceiling. Pretend the wet crawl of spider spit isn’t what it is. Pretend it’s a frail line of bubble bath. Channel decadence. Bathe in collected rainwater. Hope that body heat will be enough to warm it up. Pretend the soap didn’t come from a care package, something cheap and practical and unscented. Ignore the tightening skin, the flakes it leaves in your hair.

  Think back to when Aimee was living on Manning, the clawfoot bathtub on the day I got evicted. Spent an hour in pink heat, perfumed water bubbling with the scent of roses while Aimee sliced watermelon in the kitchen, left it waiting for me until I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in the cool silk of her robe. Channel decadence.

  Aimee’s got her period. While I’m in the tub she’s washing out her homemade pads in the sink beside me. The only girl here who still gets a period. The rest of us are simply too emaciated. Aimee’s just as underfed but somehow her body hangs on.

  A guy showed up here after the White Doom show, wasted and saying he’d “eat out any girl on her rag,” convinced women pass on their proteins through menstrual blood. “All I want to do is lick at girls who’ve got blood coming out of their crotches,” he said, adding that he’d trade it for a mickey of rye. Aimee was the only one who took advantage of the offer, but the others tried: Brandy offered a bony ass, Carrie the light brush of the wide space between her thighs.

  Me and Aimee didn’t talk about it after because we knew this water could never get you clean enough. No point in spreading the mess around.

  Channel decadence.

  Don’t hesitate, just go.

  Anticipating the dread but it doesn’t come. There’s too much dampness for it to cut through. There are no more days where you leave your jacket open at the end of winter to feel the freedom of a warmer spring wind snaking down the arms, up the back. There are no more days when your legs ache from struggling against newly packed snow. Now, when it’s not sticky hot there’s a biting dampness, something that comes in too close.

  Trevor’s heard about a coffee shop open on the west side of Queen Street that sells coffee in exchange for whatever you could offer: a cup of rice, a roll of gauze, a needle and thread.

  “I heard the guy running it will take a hug and a kiss as payment, if you’re a girl,” Trevor says.

  Me and Aimee decide to check it out. Aside from a barter system we don’t know how they’re holding it together and don’t really want to. In seconds we go from being curious to needy, hungering to taste something real, to ease through the comedown we knew would be on us at any moment.

  We ask Trevor if he wants to come but he shakes his head, no. “Me and Cam are patrolling again today,” he says.

  Me and Aimee roll our eyes at the word “patrolling,” which is what Cam calls walking around, looking to see what’s still out there. They map out dead landmarks and squats on the living room wall, write down the addresses of houses they’ve broken into. They’ve yet to come back emptyhanded. A couple days ago it was a case of cat food. Another, two pearl necklaces, which Trevor gave to me and Aimee when Cam wasn’t looking.

  Aimee moves to a row of sharpened sticks lined up in the mudroom and chooses two, holds one out to me. I slide it into my backpack. We all help make spears, to keep the dogs away. I haven’t had to use one yet and I don’t know if I could drive it in hard enough if I had to. We bring a pocket comb and a bar of soap and hope it will be enough to buy us something warm and wakening at the coffee shop.

  On bikes, we coast around stalled cars and pump our legs up every incline. Our bodies are getting hard. We are turning to stone, though, not strength. Our thighs fight with us to preserve nutrients, to hang onto every calorie just to stay awake. Since the fires and the suck of sound, since the disappearances and the dead weather, the city seemed to expand, its streets lengthened for miles with blanks inserted where structure and density used to be.

  We pass the park where Hunter and I once fell asleep under a tree on a summer night, drunk and giving in easily to circumstance, spontaneity. Today there’s a dead body, right where we’d drifted off, clothes and limbs torn near clean. Death
by dog, it seems.

  The coffee shop has no sign, but it’s marked by the heavy condensation in the front window, beads of water streaking down. Something clawing its way out. Two feet from the door is a fecal smear, watery and voluminous. We’re starting to recognize the angles and shapes of shit, can tell whether it’s human or animal. This one is definitely human. Inside, the place is packed, but there are only twenty seats. The tables are small, chairs so close together everyone is almost touching. Everyone’s looking at each other, wondering where we all came from. There’s no sense of relief at seeing others, no effort to come together. There is a table between four men. Aimee tells me to hold it while she orders. To my left a man snorts inwards, hard, sucking back snot. I can hear him swallow it. I swallow too, fighting a lump of rising nausea. I can’t tell if this is part of the grayline comedown or just everyday disgust.

  I hold my breath, waiting for his cough to come but it doesn’t. I have to breathe. The relief in a held breath is not in new oxygen but in letting go of the pain of what’s trapped inside.

  Behind the counter is a man whose muscles have gone soft but still show the bulk his body once held. His eyes are half-hidden with heavy brows, grey cats’ tails to match that of the feline now prowling between people’s legs under the shop’s tables.

  Aimee makes her order and smiles, but the man just nods, says nothing as he turns to fill our cups. He nods again as he takes the comb and soap, wordlessly sliding them under the counter. His left arm is pitted with a dog bite, two perfect rows of scabbed red holes. It reminds me of something I heard once: that if a dog’s tasted blood, he can never be the same again, that the hot copper touch on his tongue takes away the taste for anything else.We should have brought him one of our spears.

  Aimee sets down our drinks, black coffee in black mugs dark enough to hide the dirt, old imprints of other people’s lips. We don’t ask how anything is washed, or where the water for the coffee came from. Don’t care anyway. Caffeine is a buzz that’s been missing from our bloodstreams for so long that we just want to get it into us.