by Brian Keene
“You might not have a choice, Jack.”
“Shit . . .”
“And there’s something else to consider.”
“What?”
“While we’re watching each other’s backs, we also need to keep an eye on each other. If either of us misses a dose—or if we’re wrong about that and this . . . whatever it was that caused this, infects one of us, the other could be in real danger.”
“We’ll be okay,” Jack insisted. “In truth, I was thinking about that earlier. I figure that if we were gonna go psycho, we would have changed when Marcel did.”
“We don’t know that. We don’t know anything.”
Jack’s expression fell. “So you think we should split up? Go our separate ways?”
“No. I just think we should be careful around each other. Marcel was complaining about a headache right before he snapped. If either of us gets a headache, we should tell each other right away. Agreed?”
“And then what? We kill the person with the headache? We abandon them?”
“I don’t know.”
Jack sighed. He looked as if he were ready to cry.
“Look,” Angie said after a pause, “I think you’re right about finding some news. Let’s try that first. We’ll worry about everything else in time.”
“Okay.”
Still using caution, they found two student-sized backpacks in the employee locker room. They filled these with bottles of spring water, crackers, sardines, dried fruit, and other canned goods, as well as medical supplies, toiletries, matches, cigarette lighters, and anything else that might prove useful. Jack considered grabbing some cash from the registers, but decided against it. He wasn’t sure what good cash would do them now, except to maybe start a fire with. Angie took a carton of cigarettes from behind the customer service counter.
“Do you smoke?”
She shook her head and then shrugged. “Fuck it. I do now.”
They crept to the front of the store. The electronic eyes above the doors registered their movements and the doors slid open as they approached.
“Oh . . .” Angie stared out at the parking lot. Sodium lights bathed it in a sickly yellow glow. “It’s even worse than it is in here.”
Jack said nothing.
FIVE
The parking lot was littered with corpses and debris. Something had sparked a fire, and many of the cars were now nothing more than blackened hulls. Some of the bodies were burned as well. Crows and other birds perched on the dead, scavenging the choice bits. The stench was revolting. A dog wandered amidst the chaos, but ran away when it saw them.
Slowly, they walked outside, clutching their weapons, supplies, and most importantly, Jack’s magic beans. The doors slid shut behind them, and the electricity went out, plunging the store and the parking lot into total darkness. Squawking, the birds took flight. The stench grew stronger.
“I can’t see shit,” Angie whispered.
“Neither can I. The power must be out everywhere.”
Jack looked around. There were no streetlights or glows from the windows of the nearby buildings. No car headlights, no radios blaring. Even the birds had fallen silent. He gazed up at the sky. The stars were hidden behind a curtain of clouds. He searched for the twinkling lights of a passing airplane, but the sky was empty.
The silence overwhelmed them.
“It’s the end of the world,” Jack said. “For real. The end of the fucking world.”
“No,” Angie disagreed. “It’s not the end of the world. It’s just the end of the people. The world will be just fine. Look around us. The world is still here. It’s just the people that are gone.”
“We can’t be the only ones left alive,” Jack said. “It doesn’t make any sense. There has to be others like us.”
To Angie, it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.
They took a few hesitant steps forward. Jack stumbled over a severed arm and almost tripped. After he regained his balance, Angie found his hand in the dark and held on tight.
“Be careful,” she whispered. “Wouldn’t do to break your leg after all of this.”
“That would suck. Doctors might be hard to come by now.”
She held up a hand, silencing him. Her expression was alarmed.
“What’s wrong?” Jack whispered.
Angie nodded at the Chinese restaurant, adjoined to the supermarket. The door was slightly ajar. The smell of cooking meat drifted out of the building. Despite his terror, Jack’s mouth watered.
“Listen,” Angie mouthed.
Jack cocked his head and focused. After a moment, he heard it—a slight rustling sound, followed by a crunching noise. Someone walking on broken glass, perhaps, and trying to be stealthy about it.
Gripping her weapon tightly, Angie crept toward the open door.
Something zipped by them—an angry bee. A second later, they heard the shot.
“Get down,” Jack shouted.
Angie was already ahead of him. She flung herself to the pavement, skinning her elbows and knees. Another blast boomed across the parking lot. Ducking behind a toppled shopping cart, Jack saw a brief flash of light from inside the restaurant.
“Get out of here,” a man screamed. “Get the fuck away from me, you crazy bastards!”
Unable to seek cover without becoming a target, Angie cast a terrified glance at Jack. Still cowering behind the shopping cart, he motioned at her to stay down.
“Hey,” he shouted. “Stop shooting! We don’t want to hurt you. We’re not like the others!”
The unseen man responded by firing another round. A car windshield exploded nearby. Fragments of glass rained down on the pavement. When the echoes of the gunshot finally died down, they heard the shooter yelling.
“The whole fucking world’s gone insane. But you won’t get me!”
“We’re not trying to,” Jack insisted. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. We just want to go home. Please!”
“Bullshit! You’re like everybody else. Bug-fuck crazy. They were cooking people in here. Cooking people who were still alive. Look at this grill! Who would do something like this?”
“Are you okay?” Jack called. “Are you injured? Do you need help?”
“You’re trying to trick me. I let you come in, and you’ll kill me. You think I was born yesterday, you crazy fucker?”
“We’re not crazy,” Angie yelled. “We’re like you. We just escaped from the grocery store.”
Jack decided to try a different tactic. “My name’s Jack. This is Angie. What’s your name?”
“Fuck you, Jack!”
“Why did you tell him our names?” Angie whispered.
“I’m trying to calm him down.”
“Well, I don’t want him knowing who I am. He just tried to kill us. Did it ever occur to you that he could be one of them? Maybe he’s trying to lure us in?”
“He just said the same thing about us, Angie.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“Get out of here,” the man hollered. “I’m not telling you again. If you don’t leave right the fuck now, I’ll drop you right there.”
Jack cupped his hands over his mouth. “Are you on Prozac?”
The man didn’t reply.
“If you are,” Jack shouted, “then you need to keep taking it. You’ll be okay as long as you stay medicated. We’re leaving now. We don’t want any trouble. Okay?”
Silence.
“Are you listening? Don’t shoot us, man!”
Slowly, excruciatingly, Angie crawled towards Jack. She held her breath, anticipating another shot, expecting to feel a bullet slam into her—but the man in the restaurant had fallen silent. When she reached Jack, the two of them crab-walked to a nearby vehicle. They ducked down behind it, breathing hard.
“Well,” Angie panted, “there’s one crazy person who’s not dead yet.”
“I still don’t think so.” Jack wiped the sweat from his forehead with his t-shirt. “I don’t think he was
crazy.”
“He tried to kill us!”
“Because he was afraid. And I think that’s all it was. He’s like us—he’s scared. Paranoid.”
“And that’s what we’ve got to look forward to? Paranoia? Shooting at everyone, be they friend or foe?”
“Only if we give in to it.”
He got quiet. His head hung low and his shoulders slumped. At first, Angie thought he was just waiting to see if the man in the restaurant had forgotten about them. The she realized he was sulking.
“What’s wrong?” Angie asked.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jack said. “When we get to a safer location, we need to check the expiration date on these pills.”
“They won’t have any,” Angie reminded him. “We filled the prescription ourselves. We didn’t print out one of those little labels that has the expiration date. But usually, I think it’s about a year.”
“Well, after we check on our families, our next stop needs to be another pharmacy, so we can load up on more.”
Angie sighed. “So that’s our life now? We’re going to be drugstore cowboys, spending every day looking for more and more magic beans?”
“As fucked up as it is, yes. We need Prozac even more than we need food and water. Without Prozac, we’re screwed. I mean, without it, we might as well just give up right now and march back there and let that guy shoot us. We need more.”
“No,” Angie said. “What we need is a fucking pharmacist. With no labs producing it, how long before we run out of magic beans?”
“One step at a time, my fellow giant-killer. One step at a time.”
They slowly crossed the parking lot, taking deliberate steps and picking their way through the wreckage. Then they walked down the main drag, heading away from the relative safety of the store. Both of them felt eyes upon them, but when they glanced behind, there was no sign of the man with the gun.
The city skyline loomed in the distance. Columns of smoke rose into the sky. Massive fires burning on the freeway, washing the bellies of the clouds in a wavering orange glow. They saw signs of an explosion. The burned out shell of a tanker trunk sat smoldering on the median strip. The overpass had collapsed, burying the road beneath it in a mountainous pile of rubble. Chunks of concrete lay on top of crushed cars.
They reached an intersection and came across the first dead body. Then another. Then a dozen. Then two dozen. And then hundreds. Their revulsion grew with each city block. The streets resembled the grocery store’s interior, but on a grander and more gruesome scale. The only thing moving were the birds—crows, gulls, pigeons; they swooped down from the rooftops, perching on the mounds of corpses and feasting on the choicest morsels. Dogs and cats and even a few rats were present as well, not quite as bold as the birds—but they would be by the time the sun went down.
Jack and Angie walked in silence. They stopped at a restaurant and grabbed some napkins, and then stuck the napkins in their noses to block out the smell. It was already bad. It would be unbearable after the corpses had laid out in the sun for a few days. After a while, the silence began to get to them both. Jack tried calling out once, but the sound of his voice echoing through the empty streets disturbed him even more than the carnage all around them.
“Jack?”
“What?”
“Are you sure we won’t change?” Angie asked. “Are you sure we won’t become like them?”
“Yes,” Jack lied. “As long as we take our meds, we should be fine.”
They went out into the world, and hoped they wouldn’t wake the sleeping giant.
AFTERWORD
Jack’s Magic Beans started with the opening sentence.
Okay. Yes, I know that’s how all stories start, but in this case, that’s all I had—the opening sentence. I had no ideas about plot or characters or even a title. All I had was an opening sentence. I typed: The lettuce started talking to Ben Mahoney halfway through his shift at Save-A-Lot. Then I stared at the laptop. I had no idea what happened next. I had no idea who Ben Mahoney was or why the lettuce was speaking to him.
About six months later, my wife at the time (now ex-wife but we remain best friends), Cassandra, told me about a business associate who referred to Prozac as ‘magic beans’. I thought that was interesting. I mulled it over for an evening.
The next day, I knew what happened after the lettuce started talking.
What happened was this story.
I seem to write two kinds of stories. There are my serious books (such as The Girl on the Glider, Ghoul, Dark Hollow) and then there are my fun books (such as The Conqueror Worms and all of my zombie novels). Critics and fans may disagree with those classifications, but that’s okay. These are just personal terms. This is how I think of my work. Anyway, I’ve noticed that I tend to write a fun book immediately after finishing a serious one. With the exception of the opening sentence, I wrote Jack’s Magic Beans right after finishing Ghoul—and Ghoul was a novel that kicked my fucking ass on both a psychological and emotional level. It was a serious book. It was a hard book. It was probably—at that time—my most autobiographical work to date, and it was difficult to revisit some of the shit from my childhood and work it into my fiction. In short, it left me depressed.
Luckily, Jack’s Magic Beans worked like an anti-depressant—just like in the story. Writing this novella was a cure for the depression I felt after battling my way through Ghoul.
Jack’s Magic Beans was originally supposed to be published by a small press. They never managed to get it into print (although they did publish a handful of promotional soft cover copies—I’ve never understood why they spent their money on promotional copies rather than just spending the same amount and publishing the actual book). When the contract expired and the book still wasn’t published, I got my rights back. Then I included the novella as the opening story in my now out-of-print short story collection Unhappy Endings. And now, Deadite Press have brought it back into print for everyone to enjoy. And that is my hope. That you enjoyed it, and enjoy my other books, as well. You keep reading them and I’ll keep writing them.
Brian Keene
January 2011
Without
You
I woke up this morning and shot myself twice.
Carolyn had already left for work. She’d tried waking me repeatedly, as she does every morning. It’s a game that has become an annoying ritual, much like the rest of my life.
The alarm went off for the first time at six. Like always, she was pressed up against me, and my morning hard on was wedged into her fat ass. She thinks that I still find her desirable, not realizing that every man in the world wakes up like that if he has a full bladder. Carolyn hasn’t turned me on in over ten years.
She lay there, as she does every morning, with the alarm blaring, snuggling tighter against me until I wanted to scream. Her breath stank. Her hair stank. She stank. I always shower before bed, as well as in the morning. She only showers in the morning.
I reached over her and hit the snooze button. Ten minutes later the scene replayed itself. This time she got up and stumbled off to the bathroom. Drifting in and out of sleep, I heard her singing along with Britney Spears on the radio. That’s something else that annoyed me. Here we were, both in our thirties, and she still insisted on listening to teenybopper pop music. I listened to talk radio mostly, but not Carolyn. She’d sing along with all that hip-hop shit.
It was enough to drive a man crazy.
After the shower, she walked into the bedroom, humming and dripping and babbling baby talk to me.
“Come on, my widdle poozie woozie, wakey wakey.”
I groaned, wanting to die right then and there.
“Did I tire you out last night,” she asked, as she ironed a skirt for work. “Am I too much for you?”
I mumbled an incoherent response, shuddering at thoughts of the previous evening’s acrobatics. She’d come three times. I had to envision my mother just to get it up, and still I had to fake an orgasm. Thank Go
d for rubbers.
Twenty minutes later, I was still lying there and Carolyn was more insistent, warning me that I’d be late for work. I told her I was sick, and her smothering concern made me want to leap out of my skin. Thankfully, she’d been late for work, and I got off lucky with only a quick kiss and a promise to call me during her lunch break.
I heard the door shut. A minute later, I heard the Saturn cough to life. The Saturn that we still owed over six grand on, even though it was a piece of shit. The Saturn that we’d just had to have, because that’s what everybody else was driving. My S.U.V. had been bought for the same reason and we owed even more on it.
I rolled out of bed, walking through the house that we would be in debt for until our Sixties. I called into work, biting my lip to keep from arguing with Clarence when he questioned me. Twelve years I’d busted my ass for him. Twelve years of endless monotony, of heat and grime and boredom. Twelve years of ten-hour days with mandatory overtime, running a machine I was fated to operate until the soft haze of retirement. And after all of that, he had the fucking gall to suggest I was faking my illness?
My denial was short and terse. I hadn’t meant to call Clarence a fat bastard until it slipped through my clenched teeth.
After he fired me, I slammed the phone down into the cradle. Something warm dribbled down my chin. I tasted blood. I’d bitten through my lower lip. Wincing, I stumbled into the bathroom and watched the blood drip from my chin. One drop landed on my white undershirt. My stomach, bloated from too much cheap beer, seemed to take up most of my reflection. Two days worth of stubble covered my face. There were dark shadows under my eyes. Lines had formed in the past year.
I tore a wad of toilet paper from the dispenser and balled it against my lip. With my free hand, I fingered the growth on my face, trying to decide if it was worth my time to shave. Gray hair peppered my goatee.
The first tear took me by surprise.
I was thirty-five going on seventy. I owed a mountain of debt and had just lost my job. I was married to a woman who I hadn’t been in love with since shortly after high school. I had an ulcer, acid reflux, a receding hairline, and a bloody hole in my lip. My only friends were the other guys from work, and they were only my friends when I was buying the first round. I smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and dipped half a can of Skoal. Even now, a tumor was probably spiraling its way through my body.