PostApoc

by Liz Worth

  Melanie’s soles have armour. They’re so calloused they scrape the floor, wake us up in what we guess might be the morning.

  I remember her saying, at some point in the night, that she likes the boots we all wear, us girls.

  “Can I try a pair?” she asked. Tara had a newer pair, recently looted, still stiff.

  “Here, you can break these in for me,” she said to Melanie, handing them over by their laces like stiff kittens dangling by their scruffs.

  “Cool,” Melanie said, sliding her naked foot inside the hard leather.

  Today she’s gliding over the floor, keeping her legs straight. Tara’s boots have eaten into Melanie’s heels. She stops every few feet just to take a drag of her cigarette, which I saw her sneak from Cam’s pack. She accentuates her inhalations with the pain of her blisters.

  My head is broken up into aching compartments and my mouth is coated with whiskey piss. I want Melanie to quiet the fuck down.

  “What. Are. You. Doing,” I ask her.

  “My feet are fucked up,” she says. “It hurts to walk.”

  “Why don’t you try crawling?”

  Not that I could walk either right now. I can only smoke, already too awake from these few words. I puff out a perfect circle. A fat O floats over my face.

  Melanie lays her cheek on the edge of my mattress. She asks for a drag even though she just put a cigarette out. She’s on all fours now. I was only joking when I suggested she crawl.

  The swelling of her Achilles tendon has plumped up and bruised the soft grooves of her ankle, filling out the curves between round and thin bones. A blister has broken, leaking something clear and sticky. Its center is black and its outline screams with temper.

  “I think it’s infected,” she says, following my eyes. A curl of smoke gets in my gaze and the world goes lopsided. We don’t have supplies to spare to clean her up.

  “You shouldn’t wear boots with no socks on,” Tara says, walking up behind Melanie. “The steel will wear right through the inner lining and scrape against your toes, take your nails right off. I’ve seen it happen.”

  Melanie just pushes out her jaw and stares.

  “We could leave, you know.”

  I say this to Aimee as I finger the key to my parents’ house, still in my pocket. We are in Aimee’s bed, spooning.

  “Do you think we could do it? Be on our own, I mean?” she asks.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s less protection, less connections.”

  “But maybe things could be better somewhere else.” As I say this, a thud vibrates through the house, like something—or someone—heavy just fell hard against a wall.

  “I heard they still have chocolate in Montreal,” Aimee says. “And I heard part of their subway still runs sometimes.”

  Downstairs someone’s either laughing or crying. Or both.

  “I wasn’t thinking that far, but—”

  “So where?”

  “My parents’ house. It’s empty. It could be ours. We don’t have to stay there all the time, but just for a little bit. Just to get away from this.”

  “But what about food? Picking up care packages?”

  “What about privacy? What about doors we can lock?”

  “Okay,” Aimee says. “We can go.”

  - 16 -

  FROM THE INSIDE OUT

  No goodbyes, no information. We don’t want anyone to know where we are. We don’t want anyone to follow us.

  Tara’s made it easy to avoid her. She woke up with her hand out, asking to go and do a pick up with us. Me and Aimee agreed we’d never go to a dealer’s place alone. We should do the same for Tara but we don’t, instead told her we had to meet someone today, “a friend we promised to help.” So she left a little while ago. We don’t ask if she went with anyone.

  No one’s seen what we’ve put into the bags on our backs. No one knows we’ve taken all we can. And so no one asks when we pick our way to our bikes. No one asks if, or even when, we’ll be back.

  It’s raining when we get outside. We cup our hands and drink from a bucket of rainwater in the yard before we push off. The hydration goes right to my head, clarifies.

  We ride.

  We’re breathless by Queen and Portland. Aimee’s at her calf, wiping at a cut that opened from the graze of a rusting car.

  “Should I be worried?” she asks. “Like, is tetanus an actual thing?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Didn’t we all have to get shots for that?”

  “Yeah,” Aimee says. “Maybe.”

  “You shouldn’t be out here.”

  The voice comes from behind me, belongs to a head of red hair shot with grey, a chin that’s pocked with early signs of aging.

  There used to be a club here, its entrance adorned in spires, wrought iron spirals. The door’s off its hinges now, metal links bent at impossible angles. In its place a curtain, four inches of it drifting off the doorframe, enough to show the dancefloor. I see one, two, three pale bodies on their backs. One of them moans, rolls over.

  “Come inside.”

  The request comes from inside the club, but it’s too dark to see who it’s coming from.

  “Nice boots, wanna fuck?”

  Through the slit of the curtain I can see a bloated body crawling limbless like a slug, one eye shut and the other sitting low on a distended cheek, mouth an exaggerated sag.

  “Go,” someone says.

  We get back on our bikes and we ride, take short breaks every few miles. Even when we were at our most nourished, this ride would have been hard for our smokers’ lungs, boozers’ endurance. Between breaths come the excited gasps over clean sheets, quiet rooms and privacy.

  We turn left onto my old block and stop at the neighbour’s yard. The front window’s been smashed out, frame clean of any panes, but there are still patches of pale green in the grass. Aimee scoops out a fistful by the roots and hands me a chunk. “Eat it,” she says, “so we don’t get scurvy.”

  The corpse of a cat is only a few feet away from where the blades of grass grew. Its belly is a dried slit, but the blood’s yet to trade all of its red for brown. “Looks fresh,” Aimee says, chewing through her words.

  Russet circles of toothless stains have spread across the bedspread in my parents’ bedroom. Were they there a few days ago? Am I so contaminated that I left behind an imprint?

  Aimee’s oblivious, lying back, right hand in the dead center of a stain. The comforter looks like it carries a contagion factor, like it’s leaking from the inside out. There are stains on the floor and ceiling, too, but they’re smaller, easier to avoid, which is what I do as I will the house to settle around me.

  Something scrapes against a wall a floor below—a fingernail or a picture frame. Something with just enough of an edge to catch on our nerves.

  Both of us at the same time: “Did you hear that?”

  Darkness falls. Like the house has placed a phantom hand over our eyes. A finger catches in the dip of my throat, presses. I try to push it away but nothing’s there.

  The foundation gives, tilts the house to the left.

  “Ang?” Aimee says.

  It’s still daylight but everything’s gone black, as if the darkness is coming from the house itself.

  Something like a man’s breath is at my cheek. It comes at the moment when I know I truly have nothing anymore, not even the hope of spending one night in this house. Ever since the flames became the same colour as the sky, this city has been stealing my sleep, cutting at the youth that used to be my face. Black and curls of orange could have filled us in seconds but instead, we ran. If I’d known we were running just to be left with nothing, maybe I wouldn’t have moved so quickly.

  Something oozes out of the carpet beneath my knees. Something else drips onto Aimee’s hair. The house is rotting at hyper-speed.

  The ceiling fan comes down on Aimee. “Shit!” she says.

  “Are you okay?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.”

>   Pressure on my chest. The phantom’s angry finger, its silent accusations, poking a throbbing trail down the front of me. What do you do when there are no more rules? What do you when nothing is what it used to be?

  You give in, you give up, you get out, or you get up.

  I used to know the staircase by heart, walked it a hundred times drunk in the pitch dark. I’ve let too much time pass to keep it all in my head. I miss the very first step and tumble down. Aimee is only seconds behind.

  We crawl to the front door because the house won’t let any light in even from the windows downstairs. Outside, the blindfold lifts, vision is restored. We fly off the front steps just as the tip of the roof caves in, the rest of the house collapsing beneath it.

  When there are no more rules, it’s hard to tell whether you should cry or just move on. For now, we just move.

  - 17 -

  SELECTIVE MEMORY

  Trevor’s let a dog into the house. It tore through a gap in the door, salivating at his heels.

  Lucky for us, Cam just happened to be in the kitchen and came down on the dog hard with a cast iron frying pan. We knew we’d find a use for that thing one of these days.

  The dog fell, unconscious, its head a block of brown fur and ear mites. Satisfied it would be still for at least a few minutes, Cam turned and brought his fist to Trevor’s face.

  Lucky for Trevor, Aimee rushed forward just a little faster than I did, seconds which made all the difference in yanking at Cam’s t-shirt sleeve just in time to steer the punch clear of Trevor’s nose.

  “What the FUCK were you thinking?” Cam yells, red-faced, words flying with the same ferocity as the dog’s.

  “I—I’m sorry,” Trevor says through a quiver in his chin. His hand shakes as he pushes a stringy chunk of hair behind his ear.

  “Fuck!” Cam says, spitting the exclamation onto the floor. The glob lands beside the dog’s paw, splatters an outer claw. “Just get the fuck out of my face for a little bit, okay?”

  Trevor nods, but keeps his head down, eyes from Cam. “Okay.”

  “Why do you hang out with Cam so much, anyway?” Aimee asks Trevor upstairs as she pulls on another joint Tara had tucked away in her bra.

  “Probably for the same reasons you stay here,” Trevor says.

  Cam envisions himself a child-man soldier growing an army of deviants who will cultivate and dominate what remains at the end of the world. It’s delusion. Or illusion. Ill, at any rate, and what we’re all living with to some extent.

  “He knows where to find things. He has connections I could never have made on my own. He showed me how to hold a knife so the blade doesn’t break. He showed me how to stab a stick through a body on the first try. And he’s not all bad, really, once you get to know him a little more. He can be nice. He’s just had a lot of rough times. It’s not his fault he’s fucked up.”

  “Oh my God,” Tara says through a veil of smoke. “You like him.”

  Trevor smiles, looks away. “No,” he says. “I mean, you know how Cam is about—”

  “Oh we know,” Aimee says.

  “—and besides, it would never—”

  “But just because it would never happen, or never work, doesn’t mean you still can’t feel,” I say. “You wouldn’t be the first person to want what they can’t have.”

  “I don’t, though,” Trevor says. “I don’t.”

  “Okay,” we all say, nodding in agreement.

  Trevor tokes, leans forward into our circle. “Don’t tell anyone we talked about this, k?”

  Cam calms down, and Trevor disappears back downstairs. Tara crashes out at the back of a walk-in closet. She headed that way about an hour ago, her eyes swimming for focus, mouth a maraschino cherry brightly chewed. The rest of her, legless, muscles tenderized as if someone’s kneaded powdered lithium right into the meat of her. It’s probably just heat stroke, but you never know.

  None of us are drinking today. Alcohol to a dry mouth chokes like cracked black pepper swallowed too fast.

  The buzz from that joint has disappeared and I don’t know where the next one will come from. Sobriety is exhausting. Doesn’t give any of the numbness of alcohol and keeps everything on the surface.

  Today it’s dredging up hazel eyes and narrow hips. Hunter’s hands and the questions they hold for me:

  Have you ever had days when you didn’t think you could survive any other way than to become something built out of torn skin and teeth, all elbows and drudgery?

  If you fail to die when you are supposed to, does it destroy the order of the earth?

  Aimee used to ask me if I ever think of Hunter. I’d lie and tell her no, and eventually she’d quit the question. But I couldn’t tell her yes, because it would only make memories stronger, harder to black out if I kept reinforcing them with words.

  In case I die in another day or two, I try to feel out for his spirit, to see if he’s close, waiting to help take me over. I used to imagine him standing right behind me, or watching me from a spot on the ceiling. I haven’t thought of that in a long time. I reach out, but feel nothing.

  There’s so much I’ve tried to blank out. Experimented with selective memory, envied amnesia patients and afternoon television plots. If I could forget the disappointment in my mom’s voice and the concern in her eyes. Or the guilt of once having a childhood. And the recurring reminders of what can’t be undone. The first morning I woke up beside Hunter and curled between his arms. The loss of identity when I questioned whether I’d ever really wanted to die. The confusion when Aimee’s friendship made me want to live. The hopelessness in finding an easy answer.

  I did forget things, but none of what I’d made an effort to erase. I forgot people’s faces, names. Forgot I’d ever met them, made out with them. It was easy to laugh off, just giggle and feign popularity. Assume that kind of bullshit behaviour was acceptable because I’d been dating one of the best-known singers on the scene. I knew everybody, but couldn’t possibly be expected to remember anybody.

  I even forgot them when I spent six months trying to cover up the remnants of Hunter’s kisses with the spit of strangers. Anoint and cleanse.

  You know what? I remember them all now. Every face. Every prick of stubble of their chins. I remember where we stood when we pushed our tongues together and the rush of wet when a hand went down my pants.

  As everything else disappears, the memories come rushing back. Every boy that ever crossed my hips and every word that left my lips and every look I gave and every one I got back.

  These were all the things I thought I’d lose forever. I’ve let them all back in. There are just so many people who aren’t around anymore. What I remember of them is all that’s left.

  The room stifles. My hair is sticking to my skin. Brushing it away, I can smell my underarm.

  I fall asleep and dream within a dream. A spiral in the sand. One spiral leads to another to another to another, and from those come worms, each thicker than the last, all glistening. Sand flakes off their bodies. Their mouths are wide, trying to scream.

  It’s the exposure. They never wanted to break through the surface. The next worm I uncover will have a voice and I don’t want to hear what it sounds like.

  I’ve been sitting on my heels, feet and legs tucked under me, drawing the spirals that drew the worms out. My legs are jelly, no blood in them anymore. It takes a strobe light of strength to get them out from under me.

  I finally swing my legs out, sit with them crossed instead, making sure the sides of my shoes brush away the spirals in the process, closing doors I shouldn’t have opened.

  I wake, still dreaming of a cold moon, low in the sky, its pale pink shadow twin peering out from behind it.

  My face is in the sand. The moon’s cratered face is a grimace, features fallen. It has its eyes on me. The skin along my right arm rises with bumps, hairs on end. An electric chill.

  Down at the beach there are voices followed by a hard-edged laugh, a sound with too many blades to bel
ong to either of them. I stand and start running. Not because anything I see or hear tells me to run, but because something inside me just knows to do it.

  I wake, for real this time, snagged off the night beach on shards of words spurting up from the floor below. For a second I think it’s the ghost in the basement. It takes a full sentence before I recognize the voice as Cam’s. Aimee answers him, but I can’t hear what she’s saying. She keeps her voice lower than his.

  Footsteps on the stairs, moving fast, and then Cam’s face is in mine. He’s gotten mean again. His face his red, lined with anger. I don’t want him this close to me but I don’t have the strength to move. I wonder how he does it, maintaining his strength. Maybe it’s just adrenaline.

  I brace myself for the boom of his voice but instead he gurgles, scrapes phlegm from deep in his chest. Spits a green gob on the wall above my head. I close my eyes and hear it connect, feel the spray. I open my eyes and he’s already gone.

  Aimee comes in with a glass of cloudy water for us to share. It smells like earth. I swallow my half in two gulps.

  She frowns at Cam’s spit on the wall, which has slid down a couple of inches from where it landed and started to dry to the paint.

  “I don’t know what his problem is,” she says before I have the chance to ask. She hands me her bandana to wipe it up. “I’d help you get it off but I feel sick just looking at it.”

  I double up the cloth so I don’t have to feel the firmer lumps of mucus. I dig a hole in the front yard and bury it so the dogs aren’t attracted to the smell.

  The air outside feels good. Better than inside. There are dark clouds moving in, shadows of rain. The closest thing to optimism we might have for a while.

  Cam is at the front window, watching me. I decide not to go back into the house, at least for now.

  I close my eyes and ask, “Where should I go?” My dream comes back to me and the answer that comes is: “Go where there used to be water. Go where the lake once stood.”

  The beach is dry, just miles of rock and sand now. Even if the lake were still here, it would be too polluted to drink from, or even bathe in.