* * *
Gloria beats Hope again, harder and longer this time. She and Bill might have put me out of the house, except that I have no place to go. So they settle for keeping me away from Hope, so that I cannot lead her further into sin.
Bill speaks to me only once about what happened. Bringing me my meal—meager, so meager—he averts his eyes from my face and says haltingly, “Mama… I…”
“Don’t,” I say.
“I have to… you… Gloria…” All at once he finds words. “A little bit of sin is just as bad as a big sin. That’s what you taught me. What all those people thought before the Crash—that their cars and machines and books each only destroyed a little air so it didn’t matter. And look what happened! The Crash was—”
“Do you really think you’re telling me something I don’t know? Telling me?”
Bill turns away. But as he closes the door behind him, he mumbles over his shoulder, “A little bit of sin is as bad as a big sin.”
I sit in my room, alone.
Bill is not right. Nor is Gloria, who told him what to say. Nor is Hope, who is after all a child, with a child’s uncompromising, black-and-white faith. They are all wrong, but I can’t find the arguments to tell them so. I’m too ignorant. The arguments must exist, they must—but I can’t find them. And my family wouldn’t listen anyway.
Listen, Anna, that’s a—
A nightingale.
The whole memory flashes like lightning in my head: my father, bending over me in a walled garden, laughing, trying to distract me from some childish fall. Here, Anna, put ice on that bruise. Listen, that’s a nightingale! A cube of frozen water pulled with strong fingers from his amber drink. Flowers everywhere, flowers of scarcely believable colors, crimson and gold and blue and emerald. And a burst of glorious unseen music, high and sweet. A bird, maybe one from Birds of India and Asia.
But I don’t know, can’t remember, what a nightingale looks like. And now I never will.
JIMMY’S ROADSIDE CAFÉ
RAMSEY SHEHADEH
After the world ended, Jimmy set up a roadside café in the median of I-95, just north of the Fallston exit, in the grassy depression between the guardrails. His first café, nothing more than a plywood shanty, fell to the first thunderstorm that blew through. The second was better: he dug a sort of foundation and built the walls out of heavy plywood he’d harvested from an overturned Home Depot truck, reinforced the corners with steel joints, laid down a sheet of tin for the roof. He used a Hummer’s windshield for the front window, a thick yellow shower curtain for the door. And then he nailed an Open/Closed sign beside the doorway, flipped it to Open, settled down in his lawn chair, and waited.
Two days later he got his first customer.
She was half gone already, her face a mass of pinkish sores, one of her eyes pure red and swollen nearly out of its socket. She came out of the north, staggering drunkenly between the ranks of stopped cars, moving with the hitched, staccato gait of creeping atrophy.
“Hello!” he cried, and jumped up, waving frantically, then rushed onto the road and wended his way through the dead cars, toward the woman. He stopped in front of her, panting, smiling broadly, and held out a hand. “Welcome to Jimmy’s Roadside Café. I’m Jimmy.”
The woman stopped, swayed, put a hand on the side of a Corolla to steady herself. She was wearing a man’s trench coat over sweats, sneakers at least two sizes too big for her, a pink floral top. She studied him for a moment, then said: “I need help.”
“Of course,” said Jimmy, smiling broadly. “Come inside.”
It was a grey day, threatening rain. He took her by the arm and led her down into the median and through the café’s canted doorway to its only booth, the backseats of a Buick and a Lincoln flanking a small table. He bustled away and came back with a Scooby-Doo glass half-filled with brandy, and a donut that clattered like cutlery when he dropped it on the table.
“House special,” said Jimmy.
She looked at the donut, but made no move toward it.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be able to keep it down,” said Jimmy. “You just need to have the brandy in you first.” He raised the glass to her lips. “Trust me.”
She made a face, but drank. Tentatively at first, then in long drafts.
Jimmy sat down across from her and snapped the donut in two, handed one half to her, and started on the other. It tasted like sweetened cement, hard on the outside and chalky on the inside. But he chewed and swallowed, downing it like medicine, and eventually she followed suit.
“What’s your name?” said Jimmy.
“Margaret.”
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Margaret.”
“I’m looking for my husband,” she said.
Jimmy frowned, didn’t answer. Her words dropped into the silence, like coins falling down a well.
“His name is Nabil. He’s Lebanese. He’s a lawyer.”
Jimmy held up a finger, and went behind the bar—a long board laid atop two towers of stacked cinder blocks—and pulled his drawing pad and pencils out of a cardboard box with the word Basement scrawled on its side in red marker.
“All right,” said Jimmy. “What was his head shaped like? Thin and tapered?”—he drew a wedge—“Or plump?”—an oval—“Or square-jawed?”—a trapezoid.
“Plump. But not that plump.”
“Okay.” He drew a narrower oval. “Nose?”
“Biggish. Wide nostrils.”
He drew it. “Like this?”
She shrugged. “I guess.”
“Good. Eyes?”
And they worked their way through it, building the dead man’s face, feature by feature, until they had a portrait. He sketched in a thicket of short black hair, curly and tousled, and a thick neck with a prominent Adam’s apple, then spun it around. “Like that?”
She nodded. “That’s him.”
Jimmy spun the portrait back and wrote Have you seen this man? along the bottom, then went outside and nailed it to the wall beside the curtain. He looked up and down I-95, so thick with dead cars that it seemed paved with them. He went back inside.
Margaret was studying herself in the full-length mirror mounted horizontally behind the bar. The face that stared back at her was ravaged, bewildered, numb. Jimmy said: “So hopefully we get some news. Do you want more brandy?”
She nodded, then coughed, a long wracking heave that spattered blood and mucus on the table between them. Jimmy leapt up and came around and put an arm around her shoulder and held her until the spasm passed.
She was crying. “It hurts,” she said.
“I know.” He produced a lozenge. “Try this. It helps a little.” He rose and unfolded his bed, a portable cot with a thin foam mattress, then helped her onto it and drew a woolen blanket up to her neck. “Try to sleep,” he said.
He knew she wouldn’t, though. The disease ate sleep, and left dementia and demon visions in its wake. He thought about giving her morphine, but there wasn’t much to spare, and she’d need it later.
He waited until her breathing slowed, then went outside, drawing the curtain shut behind him, and eased himself into his lawn chair. He looked out at the empty world.
* * *
His second customer appeared out of the north as well, pulling a large red wagon with two children inside, a boy and a girl, both laid neatly out and dressed formally, as if for a wedding, the boy in a black suit and a little red bow tie, the girl in a frilly blue dress with lacework at the sleeves.
“Hello there!” said Jimmy, scurrying up the bank to the road. This new visitor was large, bald and broad-shouldered, and wore a charcoal Giants jersey and a pair of blue sweats, torn at the knees. He slowed, but did not stop, and fixed Jimmy with a hard glare.
“I’m Jimmy,” said Jimmy. “Welcome to my roadside café.”
The man glanced over at the shack. “Is this a joke?”
“No,” said Jimmy, and he frowned. “Is what a joke?”
The man took in Ji
mmy’s uniform: the carefully pressed chinos, the long white apron, the little tie. The nametag. He said: “Why aren’t you dead?”
“Can I interest you in a donut?” said Jimmy. “On the house, of course.”
“What are you, crazy? Are you out of your fucking mind?”
“No,” said Jimmy. A shadow of uncertainty flickered across his face. “We have brandy, too.”
The man snorted, and picked up his pace. He was leaving. Jimmy felt a thrill of panic. He said: “You have lovely children.”
The man stopped, dropped the wagon’s handle, and, in one fluid motion, spun around and slammed his fist into the center of Jimmy’s face. Jimmy heard his nose crack, and the world went dark. When he came back to it, he was on the street, and the man was straddling his chest, hitting him and hitting him. Every blow was seismic, the pain monstrous, and then incomprehensible. A gentle thrill of peace passed through Jimmy’s body. He felt sure that he would die soon.
And then there was a voice, low and rasped, barely audible. The man paused, and looked over at the café. Margaret stood framed by the slanting doorway, stooped and leaning against the wall, wrapped tightly in Jimmy’s blanket.
He looked back. “Is that your wife?”
Jimmy swallowed the blood in his mouth, licked the blood off his lips. “No,” he said. “That’s Margaret.”
“Margaret,” said the man, and, after a moment, planted a hand on either side of Jimmy’s body and pushed himself to his feet. He wiped the sweat out of his eyes, bent and offered his hand.
Jimmy took it. His left eye was already swollen shut, and he thought that one of his cheekbones might be broken. He swayed for a moment, waiting for the dizziness to pass. “Can I offer you some brandy?” he said, spitting out a tooth. “On the house, of course.”
* * *
The man’s name was Patrick Cramer. He’d moved to New York with his wife a year before the plague, and was on his way back to Florida now.
“New York was my wife’s idea,” he said. “She wanted the kids to grow up in a city. Museums and plays and culture and shit. But we never got around to any of that, so it was just a really expensive place to live in a really small apartment.”
They were sitting outside the café, all of them. Margaret had begun screaming during the night, so Jimmy gave her a couple of doses of morphine, which had done wonders. Even though it was only temporary, he was glad to see her better, smiling, her face a lovely echo of what it had been before the plague.
Jimmy had gone scavenging the day before, and came back with two more lawn chairs and a bag of beef jerky, teriyaki-flavored. They were eating the jerky now, Jimmy tearing it into thin strips for Margaret to swallow. She couldn’t chew very well anymore; her teeth were coming loose, swimming uncertainly in the pink soup of her gums.
“I went to New York City once,” said Jimmy. “I was seventeen. We were going to look for prostitutes, me and my friends.”
“Did you find any?” said Margaret, smiling.
Jimmy nodded. “Lots of them. Big ones and small ones, fat ones and thin ones.”
Margaret laughed. “They sound like they’re from Dr. Seuss.”
“Horton Humps a Whore,” said Patrick.
“I chickened out, though. I went to a diner and waited for my friends to get done. That’s where I met my wife.”
“I have to tell you, Jimmy,” said Margaret, still smiling, “that isn’t the most romantic story I’ve ever heard.”
“‘I met my wife that night I couldn’t find any hookers,’” said Patrick, and chuckled quietly to himself. The wagon with his children in it was parked close by, under a cloud of flies.
Jimmy said: “For me, the best thing about New York was the crowds. Lots of people don’t like that, the crush, but I loved it. It’s hard to be alone in New York.”
Patrick snorted. “Easy to be lonely, though.”
“Oh, you can be lonely anywhere. I’d rather be lonely in a crowd.” He squinted off into the distance. “I liked the hot dogs, too. Is that a hawk?”
Margaret shaded her eyes and looked westward, into the diffuse light of evening. “An osprey, maybe?”
“I don’t think there are any ospreys in this part of Maryland. Mostly they live around the bay.”
“It’s a fucking bird,” said Patrick, without malice.
“My husband was really crazy about birds,” said Margaret, still squinting at the wheeling speck in the distance. “We were going on a birding vacation next month. To California.”
“Hunting?”
“No. Just looking.”
Patrick stared at her. “Seriously? You drive around looking at birds?”
“No. My husband drives around looking at birds. I stay at the hotel and get massages.” She glanced at Patrick, caught him rolling his eyes. “So what do you do for fun?”
“Make money.”
“That’s all?”
He considered. “Spending money is okay too, I guess. But it’s just the cigarette afterwards, you know?”
“No,” said Margaret. “I don’t. I like that cigarette.”
“They’ll kill you,” said Patrick, too quickly to stop himself.
Jimmy frowned. He’d been enjoying the conversation, but he didn’t much like the uncomfortable silence it had become. He said: “My favorite thing about California is the sunsets.”
Margaret closed her eyes, and Jimmy saw her eyelids flutter with a spasm of pain. “That’s what I wanted to do most of all,” she said. “Watch the sun setting over the Pacific.” She paused. “My husband was on a business trip, down in Texas. Do you think the plague got down there too?”
Jimmy got up, and said: “Let me get you some more brandy.” He disappeared into the café. The sounds of bottles clinking together came faintly from the open doorway.
“Man doesn’t talk about what he doesn’t want to talk about,” said Patrick, after a moment.
Margaret managed a grin, and bundled herself tighter into her blankets, and stared off into the west.
* * *
The next morning dawned bright and crisp, alive with bird chatter. Leaves rustled gently against each other in a clean autumn breeze. Jimmy bent over Patrick and shook him gently, whispered: “Time to get up.”
Patrick opened his eyes, blinked. The air inside the café was close and warm, faintly redolent of decay. He craned his head back and glared. “Who says?”
Jimmy held up a shovel, and smiled. “Come on,” he said, and went outside.
Patrick groaned, then struggled cursing out of his sleeping bag and went to the window and looked out at his children, still in their wagon, drawn up against the side of the café and covered now with a burlap tarp. When he turned back, Margaret was staring at him with wide and bleary eyes, her head turned sideways against the cot. It seemed detached, somehow, a separate thing laid down beside her body.
“Hundreds of them,” she whispered. “Thousands.”
Patrick blinked. “What?”
“They’re made of eyes. Just mouths and eyes, floating around like newspaper. Everywhere. There’s nothing they won’t eat.” She paused and drew a long ragged breath. “They’re so hungry.”
“Jesus fuck,” said Patrick, a shiver crawling up his spine. He inched sidelong to the doorway and out into the open air. Jimmy was waiting for him. “I think Margaret’s lost it,” he said.
“Not yet,” said Jimmy. He held out a shovel. “We’d better get started, while it’s still cool out here.”
“Started with what?”
Jimmy pointed across the northbound lanes, to a small stand of trees. “In there, I think. That’s a good place.”
“A good place for what?”
Jimmy cocked his head. “To bury them.”
Patrick stiffened, and his gaze turned to stone. “They go in the ground when we get to Florida.”
“You won’t get to Florida. Florida’s a long way away.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“But they want to
finish dying.”
Patrick didn’t answer. A muscle worked restlessly in his jaw.
“If you were a dead person, would you want to be in a wagon right now, rotting your way down to Florida?” Jimmy shook his head. “I sure wouldn’t. I’d want to be in the ground, where I’m supposed to be.”
Patrick grabbed a handful of Jimmy’s apron. “Shut up. Shut up or I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
“You’re being irrational. And you’re scaring away my customers.”
“You don’t have any customers, you fucking lunatic.”
“Well of course I don’t. There’s a wagon full of dead children at my front door.”
Patrick let go and stepped back, his eyes wide, and started laughing: hard, mirthless barks that erupted out of him like thick gouts of earth. He crossed his arms over his chest and held his sides and laughed. Tears spilled out the corners of his eyes. He bent over at the waist, went down on one knee, planted an arm on the ground for support. Laughing.
And then he lurched to his feet and grabbed a shovel and stepped onto the highway and swung at the windshield of the nearest car, again and again. When the windshield shattered, he pounded the hood into a warren of dented canyons, and struck off a rearview mirror with the thin of the shovel blade, then swung the flat against the driver’s side window. The car’s alarm sounded, a bleating horn that rose from a mild whoop to a stuttering scream. He tore open the hood and started on the engine. The alarm cut off.
Jimmy watched the birds while the car died beside him. Many of them were drab and uninteresting, but there were a few blue jays and robins, snatches of color fluttering between the vehicles, picking at what remained of the desiccated bodies inside. Before the plague, he’d never thought much about birds, except when they crapped on his car, and those had been uncharitable thoughts.
Finally, Patrick threw down his shovel and staggered back. The car was a crumpled, shattered nightmare image of itself, sitting dead and canted in the center of a halo of broken glass. He collapsed heavily on the tarmac, slumped forward, breathing hard, head sunk into the hollow of his shoulders.
Wastelands 2: More Stories of the Apocalypse Page 22