PostApoc

by Liz Worth

  Aimee’s skin is as green and bloated as the smell that comes off her. I love her too much to let her see how nauseous she makes me, so I gulp it down and suck it up as I cup her skull lightly, so her scalp doesn’t come away in my hands. I run my fingers through her hair until strands come loose between my knuckles. I braid the stray hairs and tie them around my wrist.

  I don’t have much to pack: a lighter with its last bit of flame, a few tshirts, my black faux-fur jacket.

  I finally take off Aimee’s hooded sweatshirt. It will be too hot to wear it on my bike. As I stuff it into my bag a single scream comes out of the basement, the same scream as the day we arrived.

  Outside, the wind whips tight, a bed sheet snapping flat over the city. A gust cracks something thin and light—a blade of grass maybe—across the bridge of my nose, vicious enough to open a thin red line.

  I turn around, look one last time at the house. Just in case Aimee’s standing in the window. Just in case it’s not really over. But there’s nothing left but ghosts.

  I take a bike but just walk with it for now. On my way to the beach I unclasp the bare silver charm bracelet and pull on it hard from each end. The links come apart, fall away from each other and into the cracks of the sidewalk. There’s no luck left in it. I finger the eye dangling from my ear and hope that the bracelet’s failings don’t mean there isn’t any luck left at all.

  Shelley and Anadin’s house is gone. The lake has retreated again, too, left the bare bones of their caged birds to bleach in the sun.

  “Ang!” The voice comes from a crop of trees a hundred feet away.

  Off the beach, Shelley and Anadin look thinner, older, like they left parts of themselves back there with their bird bones. They’ve set up a small area between the trees, built benches and beds out of piled flat stones.

  They had to leave most of their things behind. Shelley holds up a violin. One of its strings is broken and has curled underneath the hem of her dress. She sees me looking at it but doesn’t make a move to fix it.

  “We’ve been trying to recreate the earth’s atmosphere again,” she says. The veins in her neck go varicose when she speaks. Her skull has widened, chin extended. Shelley and Anadin both have exaggerated faces now, complexions blanched and eyes fixed in a start: cats alerted.

  “Did you notice anything different today?” Shelley asks.

  “I don’t think it’s working like we thought it would,” Anadin says before I can answer, putting her husky-cold eye on me. “Let’s go to the beach,” she says, swaying her head south for me to follow.

  “Do you still dream?” Anadin asks when we hit the stained line where the tide hit hardest.

  “I do,” I say.

  “Then that means we’re right about it,” she says.

  “Right about what?” I ask.

  They stop to sit. I come down on my knees and sit on my ankles. The circulation in my legs stops almost immediately.

  “About time,” Shelley says, pulling a dusty can of tuna out of her bag. Anadin takes a knife from her boot and passes it over.

  “You ever heard this theory before?” Anadin says, opening her mouth to let Shelley feed her a bite of tuna. “Well, it’s our theory, really, but we believe that you can’t be dead if you’re still dreaming.”

  Shelley holds the knife up to me. It’s the first time I’ve seen them with food. Their fast must be broken. The tuna’s probably ancient but it still tastes better than anything I’ve eaten in weeks. “Hang onto that knowledge for when you need it,” she says.

  “And you will need it,” Anadin says.

  “You will need this, too,” Shelley says, wiping tuna juice from the blade of the knife before handing it to me. “For protection.”

  “Where are you going to go?” I ask them, folding the knife into my boot.

  “We’re waiting for the lake to come back for us,” Anadin says.

  - 28 -

  MASS(IVE) HALLUCINATION

  It feels like I’ve been riding east for hours already but the sign on the road says I’m still only as far as the old suburbs. I glide into the parking lot of a big mall, its doors long smashed open, department store windows gutted. The sun’s coming up and the few bites of tuna I had on the beach with Shelley and Anadin wore off miles back.

  The deeper into the mall I get the more light I lose. In the center is a skylight that’s also been smashed out. Days’ worth of rain has pooled on the floor below. A dead bird has its head tucked against its chest. I get on my knees and cup my hands, take a drink.

  Someone’s taken the plates of broken glass that would have fallen from the ceiling. The gates of the stores are all drawn down but a lot of them are broken, too. I drift into skeletal clothes racks, find a black cardigan and tie it around my waist. Finally, there’s a bulk food store. The bins are down to the crumbs. Mice and rats have replaced what they’ve taken with their own shit.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “You won’t find much around here,” says a voice from behind. I spin to face a girl in flared jeans and an army parka, her tangled blonde hair turning to dreads. Look long enough and you can see she used to be pretty.

  “You live here?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” she says, “we do. We live here.”

  The girl’s voice changes then, raises several octaves until it’s nearly a child’s: “She likes to talk about how we’re all in this together but get her alone and see what she’ll do for you. She’ll write you out of her words and permanently mark you in her own version of the story. This is all going to collapse any day now and if you don’t listen to me you’ll die this way, eaten alive. Only I’ll still be here, under the extra coating of haze and smoke. That’s what’s been helping me get through this. Will yourself to a paler shade. Command your body.”

  The girl’s eyes roll. Her voice refreshes into something deep and gruff: “This could be like any other night if it weren’t for you here right now. There are girls downstairs who’ll do anything for ten bucks or a pack of smokes. You want to meet them? You could be one of them if you want.”

  “Be one of what?” I ask. “What are you?”

  But instead of answering me the girl’s mouth starts slurring, wordlessly, like it’s fallen off its track. Dark liquid drips from under her right sleeve. Her blue eyes go from sky to navy to black and back again.

  “Maybe I should just go,” I say.

  The girl doesn’t move. Her legs are in place at a wide stance, her face slack.

  I run, through the bulk food store, through its backroom, and out the emergency exit. I don’t stop until I’m back on my bike. I ride, and I don’t look back this time. My heart doesn’t stop pounding until I’m at least twenty minutes away. The adrenaline subsides but the hunger rises again, and with it this time comes weakness, dizziness.

  The sun’s high and the heat’s still bearable but that could change at any minute. I remember Cam and Trevor had looted some houses. Just a few. Why we didn’t do it more often I don’t know. Maybe we were afraid there’d still be someone inside. Maybe we were afraid of what we’d find. But today I can’t afford to be afraid.

  I exit off the highway and ride to the border of a residential area. I go for the first house I see: blue vinyl siding, gravel driveway, porch with peeling white paint, old grey wood exposed underneath.

  Everything’s intact. I rattle my fingertips across the bay window at the front of the house, wait for movement—nothing. I kick gravel at the basement windows, wait for movement—nothing. I break a window and slide below ground level. The concrete floor moves. At first I think it’s fog but no, it’s centipedes, thousands of them, swirling over each other. An inch of a scream squeezes out of me and I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep it shut.

  I trip over my shaking legs to get to the stairs, brush bugs from my ankles and calves at the threshold. The ones that hitched a ride up with me scatter off over white carpet and disappear into cracks only they can see.

  The upstairs is green upholstery and
wooden furniture, a row of stuffed animals on the back of a living room couch. I head to the kitchen and pull the cupboards open, grab at canned meat, cereal, dried peas, crackers, soups. I sniff at half a jar of crunchy peanut butter. A few of the nuts along the top are black but I stuff it in my bag anyway. I’ll eat around whatever I have to.

  I pull open the drawer and grab kitchen knives and a can opener. Then I go upstairs even though I’m not sure what I’ll find up there. Still, I take the stairs two at a time.

  My hands blur through costume jewelry and a drawer of old photographs. This house must have belonged to an older woman, or a couple. Grandparents, maybe. I find two hundred dollars stashed under the mattress. I’ve forgotten what money feels like. I wonder if they still use it where I’m going, decide to take it just in case.

  I pull up to a low-rise apartment building, the only structure left standing on a charred block. The curtain’s pulled back on a basement window, revealing a smear of blood on the wall and an upturned coffee table. I move on, ride until the sun starts to set.

  Off to the left is an old wooden barn, its slats broken off in some places, roof caved in. There’s still enough daylight to see that it’s empty. I open the canned peas and eat them cold, with my hands. I didn’t think to steal a spoon.

  I dream of trees split up the middle, rotting from their centers, full of rings of maggots that spill down their trunks. Mushrooms sprout from those same rings: long, yellow-stemmed fungi spreading in skinny bodies down the base of trees, creeping through the grass.

  In the dream it’s not The End. It’s just another day, except for these mushrooms that can pull apart an ancient oak. But that’s not all. I walk into a park and it smells of berries and cream, candied soda. A few animals—a couple of dogs or city coyotes, a raccoon—skirt the shade of the tall grass and broken trees.

  I have to walk slowly, with my eyes on the park so the dogs don’t chase me out. But then I realize they might not even notice; they’re smelling the rotten tree rings, licking at residue and slurping maggots and mushrooms. They come away with tongues tinted bright blue from fungal fluids.

  No sooner is one stem plucked before another shoots up in its place. No sooner is one stem swallowed than the animal drops, its skull coming apart, cracking open to make room for new growth, the animal’s brains used as a house for a new colony of fungi.

  - 29 -

  DON’T DIE, ONLY DREAM

  I wake. Not because of the dream but because of the warmth and wetness at my face: a wolf, white, its snout stinking.

  It pulls back when our eyes meet. The sun rises through the slats of the barn, the sky the colour of lavender. The wolf’s got the body of a girl: round breasts, narrow waist, tight hips. Hands darker than the rest of her skin.

  “Sleep,” she says, but her mouth doesn’t move.

  I dream that the lake has come and gone all over again, dragged Shelley and Anadin in with it. I can’t stand its rate of absorption. I can’t stand its soft grey surface, a slate magnified to hide what the bowels of this earth have consumed.

  On my back in the barn, I spin, land on a memory and a hope. I don’t die, only dream:

  That you had me by the hair, not hard. Right at the end before we broke apart. Your last grab, but not last gasp. You didn’t fight it.

  Did you know I wasn’t coming with you? Could you feel me dragging behind?

  When we first met, you told me about your favourite saying, something about an old proverb that a kiss was a mingling of souls, and now that we’d kissed we’d be in each other forever.

  You’ve kept your hair long: spider’s silk between my knuckles. I expected mold and the same degree of decay that’s been around me since the first sky went out. You still smell like incense and ink, blue ballpoint pen and black magic marker.

  I grip the back of your hair now like I should have then. If I’d held on maybe it would have worked. How do you work your way back into someone’s life when there’s hardly any life left?

  I’ll still hold on to you but you need to know that there’s someone else I want to be holding onto soon.

  In a dream attached to a dream Anadin’s voice rises up from underwater. “Don’t look at the lake too long,” she says. “The dregs at the bottom will suck you in with it. Just wake. Wake up.”

  My stomach is empty again. I make a pile of stale saltines I stole from the old lady’s house and eat them one at a time. The crackers are so old they’ve gone soft but I shove them in anyway until they’re a wad at the back of my tongue and a rock in my gut.

  It’s hotter today than yesterday but I keep telling myself, “Ride.” I mumble it when I can spare the breath: “Ride, ride, ride.” I don’t let myself stop until a headache arcs sharply between my ears. There’s a road motel off to the right. I manage to get into the parking lot and off my bike before I faint.

  Tara’s toe is in my rib, the steel of her boot enough to bruise. The reality is as unexpectedly crushing as her greeting.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks, the “you” heavy with déjà vu.

  It’s still day but over Tara’s shoulder I can see the moon hanging heavy and full, closer to the Earth than I’ve seen it yet. A vertical grin smirks from a crack in its belly.

  “Did you know what I was thinking?” Tara asks, kneeling beside me. “I was thinking that I couldn’t do this without you. I couldn’t be here alone. You must have gotten into my head and heard me.”

  A chunk of moon falls toward the dead of the lake. It doesn’t take speed; its plummet is slow, a featherweight rock. There’s no rush. The End is already here and wants to take its time with the process.

  There was a time when the moon was considered a good omen. When far, it meant an exposure of secrets, which isn’t always as bad as it sounds. But rules have reverted now, turned in on themselves.

  Tara’s cheeks have broken out under the skin. A tiny white worm pokes its head out of her right nostril. She wipes at it with the back of an arm and then puts out her hands to help me up. We go slow but my head still spins.

  Tara’s been living in this motel since she left the house. Neither of us knows how many days it’s been. I don’t ask. A fox, dead for maybe three days, is in the parking spot in front of Tara’s room. I can see it from here, its mouth unhinged, tongue shriveled. Tara shows me its tail that she cut off.

  “It came away clean, no blood,” she says. “I just had to shake it out in case there were fleas or something.” She’s been keeping it in her bag, leaving its white tip peeking out.

  The curtains on the window of Tara’s room have been torn off and left on the floor. There’s a knock on the door. “Just a minute,” Tara says, and then to me, “Come next door. Colton’s gonna hook me up. You want some?”

  Tara walks ahead of me and I follow her out. The room two doors down still has its curtains and its darkness expands around us.

  “Who’s that?” Colton asks, pointing at me but looking at Tara.

  “That’s my friend, Ang,” she says. “Remember, the girl I told you about?”

  “She’s not planning on staying here is she?”

  “No,” I say. “I’m just visiting. Heading east from here.”

  Colton’s counting out some doses of grayline. He stretches back onto the bed and pats the space beside him. Tara moves in, runs a hand down his thigh. Their weight against the headboard of the bed sends a light brown spider squirming out from behind it. The spider runs up the wall and into a thick web in the corner where other spiders are at work on white sacks with dark, squirming middles.

  “How much grayline have you got today?” Tara asks.

  “Some,” he says. “How good are you gonna be today?”

  “As good as you need me to be. But you’ve got to give some to Ang, too.”

  Colton doesn’t take money. I offer but he says company is his currency. Tara leaves the room for a second to get some air and he says, “I’m getting bored of looking at her when I tell my stories. And she never has muc
h of anything to say, which is why she’s always touching me. I’d like to talk to you, though. Look at you. You want to look at me?”

  He tells the stories of each of his tattoos: a scythe, a fish, a sun, a star. He tells the stories of his scars: surgery, fight, car accident, motorcycle accident, grease fire, cigarette burn.

  Tara returns, out of her head. She starts nodding out almost right away. Her chin sinks into her chest and a small wet circle of drool appears on her shirt. A spider crawls over her shoulder and through the warm spit, disappears into her mouth.

  “You want a candy?” Colton asks. He holds out three lollipops: yellow, red, orange. I go for the yellow one. It hits my front tooth and the rush of synthetic lemon mixes plaque and the copper under-taste of blood. I don’t want Colton to know I just knocked out my tooth and that it’s now gnawing its way through me.

  “Is the grayline on you yet?” he asks, eyes half-shut. Tara swallowed most of it so I’m not expecting much, but a soft wave kicks in just as he gets me thinking about it, as if it needed my permission to flow. Euphoria slowly rises through my chest, just as Colton nods off.

  I lie back, too, and try to recreate my earlier dreams, but the pain in my gums flutters through the gap where my tooth used to be and keeps me distracted. I unwrap a red lollipop that’s fallen onto the floor and rub it against my bare gum as if it will make it feel better. My stomach aches and I wonder if it’s working against the edges of the tooth.

  There’s more drowsiness with this grayline than what I’m used to. It must be cut with something but I can’t place what that might be.

  When I wake again my tooth has grown back. I had no dreams while I slept through the pain of teething and the ache in my stomach is gone. I wonder if my body pushed out fresh bone or if the tooth just found its way back to where it belonged.

  Tara’s head is still on her chest, but she’s slumped slightly sideways. The drool on her shirt has expanded into a small pool of thin vomit. Even in the dank light of the room I can see her skin’s gone grey, a colour I know from Aimee’s adoption of death.