The violence jolted the dreadlocked girl out of her stupor. She pushed away from Johnny and frantically rolled across the room, finally coming to rest against her other roommate. She pressed herself tight against his sleeping body and curled into a fetal ball. Her eyes remained open. She watched Taylor and Johnny from beneath drooping, heavy lids.
“Fuck,” Johnny groaned as Taylor continued to shake him. “Just stop! Stop! I’m going to be sick.”
Taylor grabbed the collar of Johnny’s shirt and pulled him up into a sitting position. A ribbon of spit poured from his lips, and I thought he really was going to be sick. “The other … the other end of the hall,” he said, trying to prop himself up with a shaking arm. “He emptied out a broom closet. Won’t fucking come out.”
Taylor put her hand against Johnny’s face and pushed, hard, sending him tumbling back to the floor. Johnny let out a loud groan and grasped his head between his palms. He closed his eyes and started rocking back and forth.
“Leave Weasel alone, Johnny,” Taylor said. “Terry might be letting your shit slide, but I won’t let it go. I’ll fuck you up—absolutely fuck you up—if I ever, ever see you near him again. Okay? Okay?”
Johnny let out another groan. I took that as a sign of agreement.
“We’ve got to get him out of here, Dean,” Taylor said as we crossed back through the kitchen. She paused and looked back at me over her shoulder. There was a hint of fear in her eyes, a glimmer of trepidation fighting its way past all of that seething anger. “He’s going to die here if we don’t do something. We’ve got to get him home.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s fine. I understand.”
After seeing Johnny, I really couldn’t argue with her logic. I wouldn’t wish that kind of punishment on anyone.
A grateful smile flickered across her lips. And then she was gone. She barreled out of the kitchen and back down the main corridor, quickly making her way to the other end of the floor.
There were a half dozen storage rooms at this end of the basement, but Taylor barely paused as she darted past, sending a brief flicker of light across each open door. I struggled to keep up. Finally, at the end of the corridor, she pulled to a stop. There was a jumble of debris strewn across the floor, here—a mop, several brooms, rags, a bucket filled with dirty gray water—and it barely left enough space to let open the broom closet door.
Taylor stepped up to the closet and knocked. “Weasel?” she said. Her voice was tentative, weak, a stark contrast to all the energy she’d unleashed against Johnny. She knocked again, this time a little bit harder. “Let me in. I want to help.”
There was no response.
“Please, Wendell,” she said, her voice cracking. She continued in a low whisper: “I’m sorry. I forgive you.”
Then she opened the door.
There was no one inside. The closet was a tiny space, barely large enough to house a sleeping man. There were blankets layered in a stack on the floor, the top blanket turned down in a neat triangle. It looked like a child’s bed, prepped and ready for a good night’s sleep.
“Fuck,” Taylor said, letting out a nervous laugh. In the backwash of her flashlight, I could see tears glistening on her cheeks. “All of this work … I thought we’d find him dead, and the fucker’s not even here.”
She played her flashlight across the floor of the closet. The blankets took up most of the space, but there was more of Weasel’s stuff inside. There was a stack of flannel shirts folded into a pillow at the head of the bed and, lying next to it, Weasel’s fedora. I remembered it from my first day in the city. He’d doffed it like a gentleman as he greeted me.
Taylor once again panned the flashlight across the small room, finally settling on a stack of notebooks tucked into the corner. They were cheap notebooks. I recognized the style: black-and-white marbled covers, the words Composition Book and College Ruled stamped across the front. There had been stacks and stacks of these things at my university bookstore—nearly a full pallet, dumped right inside the front door—on sale for fifty cents each. A worn-down nub of pencil lay on top of the stack, and there were wood shavings scattered across the floor.
Taylor let out a curious grunt. “His journals,” she said. “He’s always writing. Every fucking day.” She got down on the blanket and pulled the topmost notebook into her lap. She held up her flashlight and flipped through the thin pages. I could see densely packed words scrawled in pencil and ink.
She leaned forward to put the notebook back, then paused in midmotion. Her eyes widened, and her left hand started to move slowly at her side, gently caressing the blanket down by her leg, feeling … something. I couldn’t see what she was doing. After a couple of moments of tentative exploration, she scooted off the edge of the blanket and pushed it back violently, bunching it up against the far wall and exposing the concrete beneath.
And then she let out a sudden, strangled sob.
“No, no, no,” she hissed. She clamped her eyes shut and fell back against the wall. Her legs went dead, and gravity pulled her back down to the floor.
There were fingers in the concrete. Four fingers and the tip of a thumb, sticking up from the broom closet floor.
Fingers, reaching up from the world below.
Taylor dropped her flashlight, and it rolled slowly across the floor. The fingers were at the edges of its light, but they still cast sharp shadows: tapered pyramids stretching across the concrete, pointing up toward the left-hand wall. The flashlight stopped rolling, but the shadows didn’t remain still. The fingers were quivering. Not strong, conscious movements, but rather an electric tremor, tendons adjusting beneath skin, pulling tight against bone.
Taylor let out a weak groan. “It’s Weasel,” she said. Her voice was a raw, guttural whisper. She kept her eyes clenched shut. “It’s Weasel,” she repeated.
I didn’t say anything. My heart was beating fast, but I was not afraid.
I was numb. I was astounded.
I got down on my knees and pulled the flashlight over to my side, fixing the fingers in the center of its beam. The fingernails were ragged and packed with dirt, and there was a bruise beneath the middle cuticle. The knuckles had been scraped raw, but otherwise there seemed to be little damage. And the concrete itself was absolutely perfect—no cracks, no crumbling, no hint of violence of any type.
I glanced back at Taylor. She had her hands up over her eyes, as if she were trying to hide, as if she were trying to retreat from the world into the comfort of her pressed palms. I left her alone. Instead, I grabbed my camera and started taking pictures.
Journal. Undated. Weasel’s words:
(A composition book, battered and creased. The first twenty pages are filled with cramped, handwritten letters—messy and uneven, often deviating from the light blue college-ruled lines. The first couple of pages are written in ballpoint ink; then pencil takes over midsentence.
Entries are generally short—brief bursts of words separated by thick horizontal lines. The horizontal lines are bold; they’ve been traced and retraced, scribbled back and forth with a heavy hand. The entries are undated.
As the pages pass, the words become larger and sloppier, and the last couple of handwritten pages are barely legible. Left-leaning letters spill off the rule. Lines and curves refuse to meet, as if the words are losing cohesion, breaking apart and scattering across the page.
The second half of the notebook is completely blank. It is untouched by pen or pencil. It is an empty canvas, waiting for paint.)
I’ve made mistakes. I’ve done a lot of things I shouldn’t have done. And each hole I dig buries me deeper.
There’s something wrong with me, I know. Something very, very wrong!!!
And that’s why I belong here. That’s why I’m never getting out.
Yesterday, about three, I met Johnny and Trent in front of Mama Cass’s. They were tweaking on something, bouncing up and down like ADD children on cotton candy and crack. They had these wide shit-eating grins, and they kept glanci
ng at each other and exchanging looks, like they had some motherfucking secret and I didn’t measure up to share. I almost turned around and left right then. It was all just bullshit, bullshit I didn’t need. But I didn’t have anywhere else to go.
They took my arms and started guiding me east, Trent braying that ridiculous laugh of his, like it was all so fucking funny, and they wouldn’t tell me where we were going. Just Johnny saying, “It’s a surprise. It’s your motherfucking birthday party.”
I was already feeling like shit. Last night’s Jack Daniels was a rotten lump in my stomach and I wanted nothing more than another pull. On something, on anything, to keep it all down, to keep it all settled. When I asked, they both shook their heads and Trent repeated that giggling, hysterical laugh. He told me “Just wait, buddy. Fucking wait. We’ve got something better.” Then they pulled me into the building.
The place had been a high-end fashion store before the evacuation. I would have hated it, I’m sure—all gloss and empty space.
Somebody had done a half-assed job boarding up the windows before they fled, and a lot of light still flooded in through the front, between crisscrossed planks of plywood. The glass in the door had been shattered, and the place had been looted. Or maybe not. Maybe that’s how it was supposed to look. Sexy destruction, postapocalypse glamour. That type of shit.
Trent laughed and pointed back toward the rear of the store, where there was a short alcove lined with dressing rooms. His laugh faded into a manic giggle, and he started to clench and unclench his hands compulsively. He was fucked up—quite obviously fucked up on something hard—and there was a very bad energy coming from him.
I should have left right then. I should have run away. And there was a dim voice in my head telling me to do just that. But there was another voice in there, too, this one more insistent, telling me to continue on. (And maybe that was my true voice, trying to give me what I deserved. Doom. Destruction.)
There was a sound in the back of the room. A mewling. At first I thought there was a kitten back there, cowering in one of the dressing rooms. That’s what it sounded like, a sick, tiny kitten. Mewling, chewing on the air.
Fuck. A kitten. If only that had been it.
In the dressing room there was a kid. No, that’s not right. It was a thing, not a kid. Really, I don’t know what it was. The light was dim, but I could see that it was wearing ragged pants and nothing else. It was smaller than me, and it was cowering in the corner, shivering. Its skin was pasty white, almost glowing in the gloom. And that skin, it looked thin and brittle, like paper stretched over a Halloween skeleton.
Johnny pulled a syringe from his pocket, and Trent, still laughing like a fucking hyena, rushed the kid the thing and pushed it down to the ground holding his shoulders. Johnny’s syringe was nasty. The needle was fucking bent. I didn’t move, I couldn’t fucking move. And Johnny squatted down and grabbed the thing’s arm. And its mewling got worse. It was a keening, a squeal, like a pig in a slaughterhouse. It started to struggle and a stench filled the dressing room as it shit its pants.
“Help him,” Johnny said. “Hold it down.”
I moved, on autopilot, and grabbed its legs. They felt like tree branches wrapped in canvas. I held it down as it tried to kick. And Johnny
Fuck, I can’t write this. Tomorrow. I’ll try again tomorrow.
I tried to visit Taylor last night, but I didn’t make it past the sidewalk in front of the house. The front window was bright with light from a fire, and I could hear laughter from the living room. Mac’s drone. Amanda’s titter. Taylor’s voice, clear and sharp as ever.
It was cold outside and I was, mostly, sober. The whole fucking world was riding shotgun on my nerves, and I could feel my eyeballs straining to pop from my skull.
I’m really not doing well. It’s that stuff. It’s like a toxin in my blood, and it’s pooling, growing in my brain. It’s not right, nothing’s right, and the voices in the house, the laughter, after a while it started to claw at my brain.
I wasn’t welcome. I didn’t want to be there.
Back to the dressing room. That thing.
It was like a dream. You’re doing things and you can’t explain why. You just know that that’s the right thing to do. No, not right. There’s no right or wrong about it. You just know that that’s the way things happen, and you do them without thinking.
Johnny stuck the thing’s arm and pulled back the plunger. The blood, or whatever it was, didn’t draw smoothly. It was red, but not blood red, closer to red house paint, with a splash of white mixed in. And it was clumpy. The plunger would stick, and then a lump would shoot through into the barrel.
The thing was squealing. I looked into its eyes and it was terrified. Its mouth was trembling but it couldn’t speak. I don’t think it knew how. Like it was a baby, and all it could do was squeal. Its eyes were wide and terrified as Johnny drew out its blood.
When he pulled out the needle the thing stopped struggling and collapsed, limp, to the floor. Its squeal petered out. Trent and I let him go and he closed his eyes and pressed himself tight against the wall (it, fucking it, I mean). Its fingers clawed weakly against the floor.
Then I turned toward Johnny and found him smiling down at the filled syringe. Trent skittered across the tiny room on his hands and knees and held his arm out toward Johnny. He was laughing, fucking laughing, and there were tears in his eyes as he pulled back his sleeve and clamped his big hand around his bicep, right beneath his armpit, making the vein in the crook of his elbow stand out.
Johnny nodded and put the needle in. He didn’t sterilize, didn’t do anything. It went straight from that thing’s vein, directly into Trent. And Trent groaned. It was a truly pornographic sound. Then he lowered himself against the wall and leaned his head back. There was a smile of pure rapture on his face and he let out a contented sigh. Looking at him, he could have been lying in a summer field, just relaxing, basking in a bright ray of sunlight. It was like he was on a fucking picnic.
The syringe was still three-quarters full, and Johnny came toward me after Trent collapsed back out of the way.
“You’ll like this, Wendell,” he said. Johnny never calls me Wendell. He calls me Weasel, like everyone else.
I started to inch back, but stopped. It was that voice again, or maybe just my body freezing up.
But I didn’t stop him. He pricked my skin and tilted the needle up, and I watched as the clumpy red liquid swirled inside the syringe. Then Johnny hit the plunger and I was gone.
It was incredible. It was perfect. There was warmth inside my veins and I could feel it, I could fell it moving inside me. It was like I was mainlining comfort, like stuffing a down blanket into my arm. When it hit my brain … I don’t know, it was indescribable. Not an explosive energy and confidence, like meth, or a mellow, numbing euphoria, like H. It was something else. It was like nothing I’d ever done before.
I fell back on my ass and braced myself up with my hands. In my palms, pressed against the ground, I could feel the city beneath me. It was like this … again, it was like comfort. Really, words fail me, and that’s all I can say. It was comfort. Comfort and happiness, the warmth of the womb, radiating up through my body. It sounds stupid to say I felt at one with the world, but I did feel part of something larger. The city, maybe. I was not alone.
And Taylor didn’t matter, the way she looked at me—hope or disappointment—the understanding and sympathy I never saw anywhere else. At that moment, I didn’t miss her, I didn’t feel ashamed that I’d forced her away. I was part of something bigger, and I couldn’t see those small things anymore. No matter how large they might look back in the real world, back down in that place where I was nothing but a tiny, weak failure, a loser sporting big thoughts and small resolve. Here, all of that was nothing.
Trent giggled again, somewhere in the dressing room. I couldn’t see where he was and I didn’t want to move my head to look around. I felt my own laughter bubbling up inside my chest and I understood him
, I totally understood his braying, moronic glee. A hand grabbed my arm and pushed me down to the floor. It might have been Johnny. Or it could have been that kid, that skeletal, shivering kid with gold in his veins. I couldn’t see and I didn’t really care.
The dressing room was empty when I regained my senses. Johnny and Trent and the thing with the golden veins were all gone, and the room was dark. The sun had almost fully set.
I still felt high, and I staggered out of the store. I made my way back to the Homestead. I’ve been living here for several days now, but I’m always surprised when they let me back in. They shouldn’t. They have no reason. And, really, I don’t think anybody wants me here, just Johnny. I’m a fucking disaster. I don’t know why Terry agreed.
Johnny seemed confused when I asked him about the stuff we took. I wanted more, but he just shook his head and stared at me like I’d lost my mind. He offered me some H, but the thought of heroin made me feel queasy, like I was going to throw up right there.
“Yesterday,” I said. “You and Trent met me at Mama C’s and we went to that place, that store, right? In the dressing room?”
He shook his head. “No fucking way. Wasn’t us. We were here. We had Bailey go out and get us food. Trent couldn’t fucking move!” Trent was sitting on an overturned milk crate on the other side of the room and he started to laugh. Johnny shook his head and shot me a look, a private look, mocking Trent.
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