“Ayeree fee wij imaak,” Aarif said to the fading footsteps as he waved his hand dismissively. Roughly translated, his curse meant, “My dick in your mother’s face.”
Cursing and devising new curses went beyond common New Yorker flippancy for Aarif. It was both a hobby and a stress reliever.
He tapped his fit, muscly chest and felt a heart beating strong.
“I will outlive you, at least, fool,” he said to the person now gone.
Aarif bent back down over the hot stoves in his halal cart. The rice was good and done, now it only needed to stay hot. Ditto the vegetables and the lamb that rotated on the skewer, surrounded by a red-filament oven.
Four. Now he was ready for the rush.
Aarif leaned back against the cart’s lone, solid door. He couldn’t see through the metal that made up the cart’s three walls (which kept the heat in), so he simply waited, watching out the front Plexiglass window and the opening below it for the first of the drunks to come and demand their late-night munchies.
He checked the food stocks and the beverages.
He waited.
Four-fifteen. Nobody.
Bored, he checked the food again and then sent a text to his girl: (Translated) My love for you is endless. Sadly, no spoiled children have shown up to buy anything. I put my leg in their mother’s ass!
Zahrah was undoubtedly asleep, and Aarif didn’t really know how or why he’d pump his leg up someone’s mother’s asshole, but he hoped his message would make his girl chuckle when she got it.
Four-thirty. Still no line.
Aarif listened as sirens went off and shot up streets and down streets, but that wasn’t unusual. This was Brooklyn, after all. Cops and firefighters never slept here. Neither did crooks or trouble.
He heard more hurried footsteps behind his cart. Some idiot tripped and slammed into the side of it, making a metallic loud bang that caused Aarif to shriek, “bala’a il a’air!” (Cocksucker!)
The running footfalls grew quiet as the distance increased.
Four-forty five. Still no line.
He sliced himself off a strip of lamb and tossed it atop a scoop of rice. On that, he poured yogurt sauce. He might have been bored, but he refused to be hungry.
Besides, it was delicious.
Footsteps shuffled in front of the cart.
Aarif shoveled some rice into his mouth without looking up, thinking: Finally, a customer. And a really drunk one, too, by the sound of those shaky steps. Some kid with eyes bigger than his stomach who would hopefully order a good lot of food.
Aarif looked up and saw nothing.
He could still hear someone outside, but he couldn’t see the kalet (bastard).
Aarif leaned forward, face inches away from the front window.
“You hungry?” he said, half chuckling. “Got good food here. Best food!”
He pressed his face against the Plexiglass, peering left and then right, but still unable to see anything. Just a few feet of the street on either side. The lights atop his cart did little to illuminate the darkness.
Shuffle.
“Food! Hot!” Aarif shouted.
A black blur swooped down in the corner of his eye, falling to the street.
Aarif looked to the ground. There, sprawled out on the concrete, was arguably the most intensely drunken potential customer he had ever seen. The guy (he thought it was a guy – he saw men’s jeans, a black tank top and combat boots) was just lying there. Groaning.
“Yes, I bet that did hurt,” Aarif said. “You need to be careful friend.”
The shape groaned again and began to push itself up.
“You all right?” Aarif asked. He leaned down through the window opening and offered a hand. “Here, reach up to me, my friend.”
Drunk. Plotzed. Blotto. Wrecked. Still, Aarif hoped the kid wasn’t hurt. If there was blood, he’d call 911.
“Take my hand, I’ll help you up,” he said.
The shape grunted and snatched Aarif’s hand. Hard.
Aarif smiled nervously. “OK friend. Do not hurt me in the process.” He began to pull up.
The shape began to pull down.
Thinking it was drunken stupidity, Aarif laughed. “Haha, well, now, do not make me fall with you.”
The shape looked up.
It was a man. Or had been. Of its face there was nothing recognizably human, just bone and clumpy chunks of flesh. Blue eyes rolled in skinless sockets. The nose hung in dark clumps like wet red rags. The lips and cheeks had been torn off, leaving the thing with a horrifying forever-smile of white teeth that wrapped all the way around.
“Ebn el sharmoota!” (Son of a bitch!) Aarif yelled as the dead-headed man went to bite. He twisted out of its grasp, snatching his hand away in time to avoid its teeth as they snapped shut with a chilling clack.
The once-man stood, unsteady, and began to reach up through the cart’s serving window.
Aarif grabbed the big knife used to cut lamb and started swinging it like a scimitar. “Airy qalbak!” (Fuck your heart!)
He connected.
The skin on the man’s arm came off in flayed strips. The fingers were trimmed to nubs after Aarif hit them. Blood landed inside the cart with a thick pitter-patter which was distinctly un-rain like.
Great, Aarif thought, tonight is the night I get no customers except a drug-crazed psycho who wants to chew on me.
He chopped the hand and fingers down to a loosely connected filet. And then he admitted to himself that he wasn’t quite sure what to do at this point. The knife didn’t seem to be able to cut through the wrist, and the pain wasn’t stopping this junkie. It was as if he’d been hacking at old celery, but his flailing wouldn’t cut through the last bit of sinewy skin.
Still swinging, and relieved that the guy clearly could not get in, Aarif reached into his pocket with his free hand, pulled out his cell phone, and dialed 911. He held the phone up to his ear, panting as he continued to exert himself with savage strikes against a mad assailant.
The phone rang once. Then there was a digital tone, as though he’d called a fax line by accident. A scrambled, bleating signal. Then the phone rang again. There was a click. A woman’s voice spoke:
“You’ve reached the emergency services of nine-one-one. All circuits are currently busy. If this is an actual emergency, please hold the line, and we will be with you as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.”
There wasn’t much left of the man’s arm now.
Aarif hung up and dialed Zahrah. He listened to the phone ring and ring and ring while he swung the knife. His girl didn’t answer. He got her voicemail. He hung up and dialed her again. Voicemail. He hung up. Dialed. Voicemail.
Aarif frowned and shoved the phone back into his pocket. Either Zahrah was fine and still sleeping or … Or nothing. Or nothing. He refused to let his mind go there, where his girl and children were being assaulted by lunatics.
She would call him back.
He picked up a metal skewer sitting on the stainless steel counter.
The man reaching into the window wasn’t even using what could be defined as ‘an arm’ to attack anymore. It was just bone with hunks of muscle still attached.
Aarif took another swing, and then plunged the metal skewer into the man’s bright blue left eye. There was a quiet pop, like a grape being split in one’s mouth. He drove the skewer deeper, feeling a slight vibration in his hands as the metal grated against bone in the man’s skull.
The man gurgled, stopped and dropped.
He heard the guy fall with a wet thump outside.
Aarif leaned back, panting against the cart’s metal door.
Just super. What was he going to tell the cops? Self-defense, of course, the man was violent and insane. And just where the hell were the cops, anyway? He could still hear sirens going off, occasionally zipping down some far off street. The police were surely out there. And something was going on.
He wished he had a radio, or a television. He had never
bothered to get either installed here because, well, there was never any down time in the cart. There was never any need for entertainment. Now, Aarif felt like a fool.
He checked his phone again, realizing he finally had a good excuse to activate its web browsing capabilities (something else he had never had need for, and it cost too much money). He punched open the browser, ignored the warning about additional fees to his mobile plan, and waited. And waited.
SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE popped up on the screen.
Aarif grimaced and tried again, moving to one corner of the cart.
SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE.
He tried to dial Zahrah again.
SERVICE NOT AVAILABLE.
No bars. Just the little icon of a phone with a red line through it.
“Nek ni!” (Fuck me!)
Aarif slammed a fist against the wall, hard enough to hurt. He winced, ashamed of his own outburst and worried that even if Zahrah was trying to call him, it wouldn’t get through.
Just go outside and find a signal, you stupid kalet! His mind yelled.
He undid the bolts to the stainless steel door behind him and stepped down into the street. He wished then for something else he didn’t have: a car. But who could really afford a car on his meager income in New York City? A neighbor did him the favor of towing the halal cart from home to here (not without compensation, mind you), but Aarif did dearly wish he had his own vehicle.
“God, I am not sure what I did to anger you …”
He was still looking at his phone, not paying attention, hoping to see the little phone icon with the red line through it change into four beautiful bars of service, when he stumbled over the first body. The first of hundreds. Of thousands. More.
The streets were littered with them. Full of them. Packed. They were laid out like sardines, arms and legs even interlocked in some cases, as though someone had carefully tucked the bodies into place.
But unlike salty sardine snacks, every face was stuck in an expression of abject terror.
Aarif looked down the street, over the multitude of corpses, and saw fires burning bright. Everything was engulfed in flames. Some buildings seemed to have been burning so long that their infrastructures were just skeletal hands clawing up at the sky. Looking up at the building right next to his cart, he saw it was true even close to home. How could he not have noticed?
And the sky, God! The sky!
The black night should have been giving way to a bright dawn by this time, nearly five-thirty. But through dark clouds overhead, Aarif saw the blood sky above. It was a hateful, frightening, evil thing to behold. And he could see no hint of sun.
He gasped as he spied the tail of an enormous beast slithering behind a Stygian cloud. He could not guess its size. Fucking huge (translated) was the only thought that entered his mind.
Something warm hit his face, just below his right hazel eye.
He reached up and wiped it away without a thought.
Around him, he began to hear a heavy pitter-patter which was distinctly un-rain like.
He looked at his hand.
Blood.
The sky was crying. And it was crying blood.
A couple blocks down, he watched as a police cruiser skidded around the corner onto his hellish street. Its lights were on and its siren screamed. He saw the weight of the car crush the bodies underneath it. He saw the way the vehicle’s chassis jumped and stuttered as it ran over corpses.
It was headed his way.
He stood back and waved, hoping to catch the driver’s attention.
As it got closer, he saw that there were four people in the car. Four shapes, at least.
They blew by Aarif without even a glance, but he saw how horrified they were as their gore-stained chariot took them away.
What had happened tonight?
One of the nearer corpses sat up and turned to him. Like the insane thing that had attacked earlier, this monster had no face, but its eyes blazed. It let out a low groan as it tried to stand. Being one of the many the cop car had creamed, this was no easy task, since its midsection and legs appeared to be mush. But the thing still worked feverishly.
Next to it, another began to stir. And then another, and another.
A dozen dead faces were glaring at Aarif before his brain snapped out of its initial shock and told him under no uncertain terms to get the fuck back into the cart and lock the door.
By the time he was back inside, there were a hundred moving.
And they all sounded very hungry.
The dead screamed. Their fists hit the sides of the cart with enough force to rattle it, but they did not dent it or move it (Aarif felt sure they could tip it over if they worked together, but if the madman from earlier was any indication, these creatures didn’t have much going on between the ears). Aarif was suddenly very happy that he’d spent the money on a good, tough product. That was one proper expenditure. It was now the only thing preventing him from being brutally murdered. Or worse: devoured.
His mind immediately went to Zahrah. To his children. To Bahir and Sabirah.
His heart melted and depression took hold like a flash freeze. “You better keep them safe,” he cried on the floor, spine to the door, panting as he listened to the dead folks outside gather and moan and assault his cart. “You better protect them, or I will find you and kill you myself –”
Threatening God was not something that would gain him favor, but at this point, it didn’t seem like there was much to lose.
The dead had come back, finding no room in hell. The sky was bleeding, covering the land with a thick coat of hemoglobin. And behind the black clouds above, beasts were flying and hiding.
It was the Day Of Judgment – Yawm al-Deen.
He was an island of the life and light adrift in a sea of darkness and the damned. Trapped behind the walls of this stainless steel food cart, Aarif watched and listened and waited and cried as the world ended around him.
Outside, the creatures gathered. As attracted to Aarif’s little island of light as a bug would be to the same. Mindless as they seemed to be, the dead’s hands began to find just the right places to hit. Their hands found just the right spots to attack on the steel frame of the cart to begin rocking it back and forth and threaten to turn it over.
Aarif felt the cart as it shook and shuddered. And he worried about just how the cart might fall if they managed to tip it.
If it fell with the Plexiglass serving window facing down, then he was in luck, because that way, he’d be entirely sealed. If it fell with the back door to the ground, then he was effectively fucked, because all the creatures would need to do was climb atop his steel enclosure and reach inside for their packaged meal.
A turtle flipped on its back. Defenseless.
Another horrible thought occurred to him then.
I’m on a hill and the cart is on wheels.
The brakes were engaged, of course (they had to be in order for him to remain stationary and feed the hordes of drunks nightly), but how long would they last against this onslaught?
The answer was: not long.
Aarif heard something crunch as the cart began to roll. Maybe some unfortunate thing’s arm – maybe its leg. He didn’t care about what he ran over so much as how he’d end up, and he waited with baited breath as his little safe house took off.
Down, down, down.
He gripped the knife and his cell phone, still desperately hoping Zahrah would call.
Burned out storefronts rushed past the Plexiglass serving window as he rocketed down the hill.
The cart jumped and jounced as it ran over God-knew-what.
Aarif looked up to its steel ceiling. He saw not a reflection of himself, but the visage of a dark trembling shape. He prayed, as a good man, that things would turn out all right.
The ride remained chaotic. Rickety. Noisy. Uncomfortable. Fast.
Skeletons of architecture flashed by him (the hill seemed far longer than he remembered). Everything, it seemed, was engulfed
in flames. At one point, Aarif thought he saw a woman leaning out an apartment window, screaming for someone to grab her baby. But that was gone in a heartbeat. And he had no idea what fate might befall either mother or child.
Had he been able to, he would have helped.
At least, he told himself he would have.
The cart caterwauled and careened and crashed into a coffeehouse at the bottom of the hill. When it hit, Aarif was hurled up, down and sideways. He cried out from the pain.
Then the enclosure settled.
Aarif stood, checking himself and his safe house.
The floor was the floor. The walls, walls. His cart hadn’t really been upturned at all, though there were foodstuffs scattered about. Still, all told, it was as good an outcome as he could have hoped for.
The serving window was pressed tight against one of the coffee shop’s floor-to-ceiling windows. There was no space between the building and his cart for any monsters to appear.
Aarif wanted to jump with joy.
For a moment, anyway.
He watched as a girl of perhaps twelve ran into the coffeehouse. She was small, blonde, and panicked. Covered in blood, it was obvious that the girl had survived something wretched to get this far.
Aarif immediately thought of his daughter, Sabirah.
The young blonde girl looked up and saw him. She ran to the window that separated them. She pounded on it and screamed something Aarif couldn’t make out.
Aarif shook his head and pointed to his ears to indicate he couldn’t hear her.
Then he snapped his fingers, pointed to one of the wooden chairs in the coffee house, and made a forward swinging motion.
Break the glass, girl, Aarif thought. Break the glass.
He shoved his silent cell into his pocket and mimed the action again, hoping the girl would get it.
She did. She grabbed the nearest chair and hoisted it up like a cudgel.
Yes. Yes! Aarif thought, imagining Bahir and Sabirah, knowing in his heart that his own children would be this quick and this smart. Break the glass and I will pull you into the cart. To safety.
The girl lifted the chair and swung it hard against the window. The big pane shook and cracked, but it did not break.
The Space Whiskey Death Chronicles Page 5