Elise and The Butcher of Dreams

by Steven Welch

  BROOKLYN - FIVE YEARS AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK

  He was a big man with a righteous beard and he held his bagged copy of an “Iron Man” comic book tight to his chest in the dark basement of his parent’s home.

  The pounding on the basement door was loud. It was an invasion, just like fifteen years before, just like the day of The Turn, but these weren’t aliens they were men and that could be worse.

  He wasn’t a child though. Josh was a man and this time it would be different.

  Fifteen years ago Josh had been just another geek.

  Josh grew up obsessed with comic books. He eventually turned his love of colorful pulp paper and fantastic stories of heroes and monsters into a part-time job at a little comic book and paraphernalia shop where he was paid in breakfast donuts and comics.

  Josh had been heavy. He was born a chunky baby in a hospital in Brooklyn. As he grew and a few years passed he stayed plump and soft. The other children picked on him because of his weight and his glasses and his bad haircut. He was not an athlete, so the athletes abused him after school. He was not handsome so the pretty children mocked him. He was kind to others as he had been taught and that was probably his biggest weakness because that made him an easy target to those who were cruel. His parents were lovely people but socially awkward and they raised a kind but awkward child.

  He was reading the latest issue of “The Fantastic Four” when the floor of the comic book shop shook and there was a deep rumble that grew louder and louder until he thought the windows would shatter. Josh ran to the door and looked out to the first moments of the day the world ended. The comic book dropped out of his hands and he stared up in wonder at the swarm of enormous jellyfish that soared above Brooklyn.

  It had to be an invasion. He knew superheroes and aliens and he damned well knew an invasion when he saw one.

  Josh ran home, or rather, he waddled as quickly as he could to his home on thick legs and along sidewalks that were shaking and lifting and tearing at the seams. He would determine later that, in those first few hours when portals opened and drained away the ocean, the bedrock of Manhattan had been seizing and rupturing.

  That awful Scott Honer used to mock the way that Josh’s thighs would rub together as he walked and Honer cruelly predicted that one day the friction of his pants would create a fire and Josh’s balls would burn. Josh did not think of Scott Honer nor burning balls as the world was ending.

  He and his parents huddled at home, locked in their basement and holding each other close. They felt the shaking of the ground and heard the sounds of military jets flying overhead. They heard explosions and screaming. They watched the news and saw the incredulous reporters trying to explain the unexplainable. It was absurd. It was impossible.

  The ocean cannot disappear.

  Josh’s father was a ham radio enthusiast, and he went to work with the shortwave radio set in the basement. Voices came bouncing from the ether proclaiming the end of all things, the coming of God and Jesus, an alien invasion, a plot by the government. Screams, chatter, many languages, all confused and reaching out in terror through waves of energy that bounced around the world. The shortwave radio was the one global communication network that could survive the end of the internet, the end of the power grid, the end of things. Primitive, simple, and reliable. Josh’s father’s voice joined the chorus that screamed for help and salvation. His voice, like the others, might have been heard, but they were all just voices. Just ghosts. There was no help.

  Time passed. The basement became too hot and their water was low so the family came out of their shelter to find their neighborhood in flames. Josh peeked through the curtains of the kitchen window and saw a thin black creature that looked like a Bernie Wrightson sketch come to life.

  The monster skittered down the alley between their house and the home of Mr. Greenberg and his many cats.

  Moments later he heard Mr. Greenberg scream, and the scream became a gurgle and then became silence. His father and mother were gathering canned goods and bottles of water from their kitchen pantry. They told him to go back down into the basement and they gave him a paper bag full of supplies so he did as he was told because he was a good and obedient son.

  Moments after he had set the bag down on the dirt floor of the unfinished basement he heard his father curse and his mother scream. Josh grew up reading about heroes but he was not one and he was so terrified that he could not move. The screams and begging cries of his parents stopped, but not soon, while Josh stood holding a candy bar and soiling himself from fear.

  He did not know why the tall dark creature did not go down into the basement but it did not.

  Days later Josh forced himself to go up into his home and what he saw made him scream and cry until he fell asleep on the floor of his family’s kitchen surrounded by the cold, gelatinous pieces of his mother and father.

  The cleaning had been the worst and he would still wake up screaming from time to time. Movies and comic books don’t tell you how difficult it is to clean up dried, congealed pools of blood. They made it look so easy. It wasn’t easy, and it took hours and he ended up digging into the thick pools with his fingernails to pick away at it, to make it all go away.

  A week passed. Josh played with the shortwave radio until he got the hang of it. He listened to the voices but there were fewer and fewer as the days went by. Soon he could spin the little dial for hours and not hear a single cry for help. Apparently ham radio enthusiasts were not immune from death. The voices went well and truly silent when the grid finally failed. Josh had been surprised that the power had lasted as long as it did.

  Josh knew of post-traumatic stress disorder but did not understand it until the world ended. The trauma of finding the remains of his mother and father expressed itself physically as an uncontrollable tremble that would hijack Josh’s entire body and force him to lie on the floor until the shaking stopped. Sometimes the shaking became so violent Josh feared he would shatter his own teeth as his jaws clamped together.

  Hunger and fear forced him to go outside to find help. That’s when Josh saw that the skyline of New York was gone. The horizon beyond his little neighborhood usually had such a wonderful view of the beautiful skyscrapers. There was now just an endless red haze of smoke and dust and a sun the color of a rotten orange. A black ship as large as a mountain was rumbling in the distance and appeared to be razing everything in its path. Sandstorms of debris billowed behind the black ship and roared up into the sky, horrible clouds of detritus.

  A ship from another world was consuming the city. Like in the comics.

  So it was in those days when he had seen the butchered bodies of his parents that Josh saw the end of the world.

  That had been fifteen years ago.

  Josh was now tall and strong and his beard would have been described as “epic” if anyone were around to tell him. The tremors were no more but there were nightmares from time to time. Josh was adapted to the new world but there were nights when he woke up screaming.

  He had survived but now, after enduring so much, he was once again hiding in his parent’s basement.

  It was another invasion but this time there were no ships from other worlds, no alien monsters.

  People could be just as cruel.

  The wood frame of the basement door couldn’t take much more pounding. Josh stood in the darkness with his bagged copy of the first issue of “Iron Man” held tightly to his chest.

  The basement door caved in and flashlights revealed the brightly colored treasures of Josh’s basement. Stacks and rows and countless volumes of comic books lined the walls. The basement was a museum of comics and it had taken Josh many months to arrange and catalogue everything in just the right order. For all he knew, this was the last comic book collection on Earth.

  Men dressed in black jeans, jackets, and ball caps descended into the basement. Guns were held ready. One was carrying a large red plastic container. Josh could smell gasoline. The fuel would be stale but it could
still burn.

  “Stand down, buddy. We won’t hurt you if you just surrender your contraband,” said one of them. He was heavyset and moved with confidence toward Josh.

  Josh had been a kind and gentle child but after the end of the world he made some behavioral modifications he felt were necessary considering the circumstances. He exercised hard and transformed his body. He scavenged for guns and ammunition and he trained himself to be an excellent shot. He thought long and hard about the violence done to his parents and he developed a cold, dark place he could enter where he felt he could do anything to survive. Josh always loved Batman but Batman didn’t use guns so Josh modeled himself after The Punisher because The Punisher was a stone-cold killer.

  “Not today, scumbag,” he said in a guttural voice patterned on an old movie he’d once enjoyed. Josh dropped the comic book and pulled his Smith and Wesson .45 Magnum from behind his back. Her six chambers were locked and loaded.

  “Hey,” said the heavyset man, raising his hands. There were four men, including the leader, and they all had weapons aimed at Josh.

  Josh stood still. His eyes squinted and he would have been pleased to know he looked a bit like a bearded Frank Castle.

  “Hey,” the man said again, “no need for this. Just let us deal with your contraband and we can all go back to our lives.”

  “You can tell The Dream Butcher to go to hell. You can’t have these books.”

  “Man, you’ve heard of him? That’s awesome. Look, I’m Dominic from the Bronx. Local guy just like you. Now, how in the hell have your heard of us? I didn’t know we had that kind of rep, brother.”

  “Shortwave radio. Few voices left but I’ve heard them talk about some asshole who’s going around destroying everything beautiful that’s left in the world. The Dream Butcher. Now, I’m not your brother. Leave.”

  Josh sounded as tough as he’d always hoped.

  Dominic from the Bronx waved his hands at Josh.

  “Hey, he’s not like you’ve heard, not at all. He’s a good guy doing what he thinks is right and we agree with him. I think you will too. Listen, you must have been a kid when the world ended, right?”

  “Perceptive.”

  “Sure, just a kid. And your folks probably got killed, am I right?”

  Josh was quiet.

  “Right. Lots of people got killed. My family. His family. His family. Lots of people got killed. And you know why?”

  “I saw it. I saw the ships and the things that came from the sky and from the place where the ocean used to be.”

  “Yes, but those things came here because they were invited, my brother. Invited. This art, these fantasies, these stupid things that people made up for a little mental masturbation on a Tuesday afternoon, these things opened doors, man, and those monsters came through those doors and here we are in your basement, you and me both with dead families. So what’s it going to be, brother?”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Yes, it is. And so’s the ocean going away and then coming back. Ridiculous. Like some kid’s bedtime story. Physically impossible. What are you gonna do, huh? Crazy world.”

  Josh looked to his right, to the catalogued and complete run of “The Fantastic Four,” and that’s when Dominic fired and turned Josh’s head into a pink cloud. His body dropped and everything that had made Josh such a kind and gentle young man was blown away.

  The last thing Josh saw was Jack Kirby’s drawing of a colorful super team of adventurers poised to save the world.

  “Told him to calm down, told him there was no need to get messy,” said Dominic to the others, “but listen, we done good fellas.”

  The boards of the staircase creaked under the weight as Jack the Dream Butcher stepped down into the basement. He let out a low whistle when he saw Josh, the stash of fantasies, and the shortwave radio set in the corner of the dark room.

  “Clean up and move on. Let’s get more miles under us today,” he said.

  Stale gasoline, a tossed match, and in a matter of seconds Brooklyn’s last great comic book collection was nothing but ash, as lost in history as the skyline of the city.

  AQABA - FIVE YEARS AFTER THE OCEAN CAME BACK

  If you could fly, you would see the silver face of the Red Sea as it washed still and deep over the port of Aqaba on the Northern shore of The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.

  You would see how the calm waters on that night lit by the moon touched Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel alike as it made its way out to the ocean beyond. You would swoop and soar over the desert along the King’s Highway that led to what once was a tourist town of beaches, hotels, bars, restaurants, coffee shops, gift shops, and hookah joints.

  If you could fly over the now black emptiness, you would feel the cool night wind against your face and you would circle, spiraling in the air currents, riding the thermals, and you would see that there was only one town in Jordan that still had life, electricity, music and still hosted humanity not as it once had been before The Turn but at least more so than anywhere else as far as the horizon.

  If you could drift along the tides of the thermals a thousand feet above the desert, you would see that there was Aqaba and there was nothing else. There was blackness yes, almost an entire city where there were no fires and no lights and no sound, but there was life in a block along the shore, a shore that had once seen so many visitors from around the world who came for the diving and the desert jeep rides and the visits to legendary Petra, and that block of gift shops, small poolside restaurants, and a couple of tall hotels sparkled with dots of light. There were people there, and they were alive and celebrating on the shore of the Red Sea on a moonlit night and you would feel the air grow warmer as you soared down and circled those towers and dropped lower past a billboard or two until you saw those gathered where the lights were brightest. You would be a moth to the flame as you flew hard to the party. You would hear music, pounding, driving, desperate music and you would drop down to join.

  You would grab a drink and settle in because the band was playing The Clash and you would rather be in that moment than in any other. You would feel alive in a world that was pretty damned empty otherwise.

  It was a hot night in Aqaba but the breeze from the Red Sea was wonderful as it blew into the restaurant and bar called Khoury’s and the band, The Aquanauts, was perhaps the only rock band in the world.

  Khoury’s was a horseshoe-shaped place with a long zinc bar on one side and a dance floor on the other. The stage was set back against the open space that once were tall windows. The glass was long gone so the cool ocean breeze came straight in off of the water. The room smelled of alcohol, smoke, and sweat. The walls were charred black from fires and the only light was the orange and yellow glow from dozens of candles and torches. The flames added to the heat but when there was a band they couldn’t spare power for the floodlights. The energy generated and stored was there that night to power the music.

  Elise St. Jacques stood on a small plywood and cinderblock riser under the light of countless candles and torches that burned with stale oil. She was tall and strong with her head shaved close like the stubble of an old man’s beard because the lice are worse now and hair is their home, but you would not see it in that moment because she wore a black cowboy hat with faded paper and feathers in the brim. A jagged scar ran north and south the length of her neck. She wore a dark blue and yellow Kevlar vest and ragged jeans. Her face was pinched with concentration, wet with sweat, and dark with a few scars revealed in the shifting amber light. Her shirt was chopped at the shoulders and wiry muscle roped long arms that held a battered Gibson Les Paul low at her waist.

  “Spanish Bombs” blasted out, her left hand running chords while her right thrashed a rhythm along the strings. This was an old song she learned while in Paris at L’Académie des Les Scaphandriers.

  This had been a poolside bar on the Red Sea in a tourist town of nearly a half million people. There had been hookahs and grilled meat and families. Tonight, though, the
entire population of Aqaba was a jumping and dancing cluster of three dozen men, women, Orcanum, and children. They partied as they emptied old wine bottles and danced to the propulsive blast from shitty speakers driven by a hundred car batteries rigged into a bizarre power grid kept alive by a network of wires, solar panels, and windmills.

  Elise jammed her hand against the body of the guitar and banged away on the strings. A simple chord progression. She was sweating, and the salt burned her eyes but she didn’t care about that. When she had hair it helped, and the hat absorbed some but now with the close-cropped scalp, the sweat just poured down over her face. She shook her head and sweat exploded out into the torchlight and over the crowd like fireflies.

  Ahmet the Engineer pounded his palms on the tarabuka less than a meter to her left while Sasha’s thick fingers pulled the strings of a standup bass to her right.

  The Octo-Thing was on a little platform that dangled above their heads, suspended from the ceiling, and he played a small violin. He was a strange little creature the size of a large cat with eight thick tentacles that ended in small hands and feet, like the hands and feet of a child. The eyes of the Octo-Thing were large and narrow and gold, while its skin could be gray in one moment and electric blue in the next as it shifted and shimmered the little chromatophores in its skin.

  The Octo-Thing was a remarkable musician for a cephalopod.

  Elise looked up from the guitar as she played.

  The town was a dancing, heaving, singing mob of sweaty darkness just inches from the foot of the stage. There was old Ahmet, the maintenance man and engineer who created the power grid through car batteries, ingenuity, and sheer will. He was also quite the percussionist. There was Cyril the Lebanese tourist who became trapped in town during The Turn and who was bouncing up and down to the beat while a young man Elise knew as Omar the Quick clapped along and laughed. There was Brea the Russian waitress who lost an arm to the sand worms. There was Tom and Igor and the children of the strange couple who lived at the top of the old Hilton.