by Trevor Zaple
“Sure,” Mark and Olivia said simultaneously, and Carlos found this very funny.
“What about you, Carlos, you covered?” Barry asked. Carlos slowed down to a chuckle and patted his Motorhead-patched denim jacket.
“Oh, I’m covered, man,” he replied in a jolly tone, “don’t worry about me”.
“Alright,” Barry said amiably, “what about you Amber? Are you going to come with us, or strike off on your own?”
“It’ll be easier for Emily to find us if we stick together,” she said easily, flashing a bright smile at Olivia.
“Then it’s decided,” Barry said with a flourish. “Let’s get out of here already”.
Jason sipped at a drink he’d gotten, something bitter and sharp with a medicinal aftertaste. The room was deafening and he’d been intimidated by the sheer amount of people crowding at the bar, jostling for drinks. One of the bartenders had caught his eye and he’d panicked, shouting gibberish at the top of his lungs. The bartender had shrugged, mixed a dizzying blur of squirts from various heavy glass bottles over ice and stirred. The result was rather unpleasant, seeming to stab at his tongue, and he was reminded of dental work. He planned on drinking every last drop, hoarding it until he could figure out an easier way to get a second one. Maybe in another one of the rooms?
The building was huge, and packed with people. He was in the basement of the Drake Hotel, in a dark room lit with lurid red lights. Near the end of the bar, set up behind a screened-off table, an unseen DJ mixed glacial, glittering music that seemed to bounce off of the brick walls and come back to the ear with jagged points. Two groups occupied the walls to the left and right of the stage, projecting weird, eerily-cut videos that seemed to strobe at random intervals. On the stage, a rail-thin young woman with black hair writhed in time to the music, dancing sinuously with her eyes closed. None of it meant the slightest thing to Jason, and he found himself both tense and bored.
Sarah had abandoned him almost as soon as they’d arrived. He didn’t care. She was only going to do boring things here anyway. He had his eye on something a little more uplifting than the booze-fuelled debauchery that Sarah had been hoping for. He stared around at the other groups of people inhabiting the spaces between the art, watching them closely as he sipped at his bitter drink. A lot of them had drugs, he had seen; with nothing to hinder them, everyone was using some substance or another out in the open. There had been a general consensus that smoking could be accomplished in other parts of the building; the basement was largely unventilated and the mixture of the sweet and acrid smokes on hand would likely have choked the crowd out. Down here, the emphasis seemed to be on the palm-and-consume type. The bar was awash with the residue of cocaine lines, and the snorting could be heard just slightly over the pulse of the brittle music. He’d seen others taking hits of acid and there was a group in one dark corner who had gotten out their works and with great pomp and ritual shot up with what Jason assumed was heroin. They were now busy nodding hazily to the beats, and one of them looked like they’d passed out. Another, a lovely round-faced young woman whose blonde hair was replete with black streaks, was staring off into space with utterly no focus, a long cigarette between two shapely fingers. The cigarette, Jason realized as he stared at her, was all ash, held together with the greatest of delicacy by her immobility.
He wanted to join in, to do all of these things that his anonymous, vicious friends had continually bragged about on the chans. His heart pounded, though. His mouth went dry. He sat and sneered and sipped his sharp drink. Where had Sarah gone? Why was he in this dank basement? He remained paralyzed. The hand not gripping the drink in white-knuckled terror was busy caressing the stock of his Baretta, obsessively tracing the engraved checker pattern. He thought about finding the roof, emerging out into the whole clean air, and either jumping to his death amongst the revelers or finding something else to drink. He steeled himself to go, several times. On three he would tell himself decisively, and then pause on two for indeterminate moments.
His attention wandered back to the junkies in the corner. There was something repulsive and fascinating in them that bored him with everything else that was floating around. He’d watched countless people snort back coke, getting red-faced, flushed really, and becoming beady-eyed little gremlins of energy for stretches of time. The junkies were taking the exact opposite tack. They were making themselves slower, lethargic, bringing themselves to a symbolic halt. Jason felt something in that. He wanted to just get off, to stop the earth’s rotation so he could find something else. It didn’t matter what, really; Jason wanted to stop feeling as though his life were an obstacle course that was rigged against him. He watched the elegantly, depressingly beautiful young woman who had achieved immobility closely. Was she even alive? If he went over there, got up and walked over and went there, would she respond? Would she look at him with confusion, and ask if he’d brought drinks? Would she knock the ash off her cigarette? If he poked her, would she just fall over, stiff as a rat on the third day of his entrapment? In his mind's eye he could see flies crawling into her ears, taking up egg nests in her inner canals. He watched maggots hatch, and crawl towards the warm, pulsing feast that waited inside. Was her entire skull full of maggots? Were they, even now, writhing behind her eyes? Would those unfocused, soft jelly orbs burst outward, spraying squiggling blind white maggots out onto the table, over the remnants of their gear?
He pushed the terrible, alcohol-swab drink away from him and very nearly jumped out of his seat. He left around the bar, making a near-run for the exit. He remembered that there were bathrooms across the hall from the bar and made straight for them without really looking. He barged in, pushed past a couple making out against the automatic hand dryers, and pushed open the first unlocked stall that he could find. A flood of brackish-brown vomit spewed out of him and splattered around the rim of the toilet as well as polluting the already-murky water in the bowl. He panted for a moment, heaved, and then threw up again, feeling his throat contract and protest against such rough treatment. His knees slipped and he slid forward, his chin resting lightly on the front of the toilet seat.
The man next to the automatic drier broke away from his passionate groping to peer over at Jason.
“Hey man, you ok?” he called out, concerned but clearly finding humor in the situation. Jason chuckled weakly.
“Yeah, buddy, never better,” he croaked. The man laughed as if this were the funniest thing he’d ever heard.
“That’s hilarious, buddy, how much have you had to drink?”
Jason groaned. “Nothing, virtually nothing. I just, I thought…I don’t really want to talk about,” he concluded.
“Wow, that’s too bad, already throwing up and not even drunk. Babe,” he continued, speaking to the girl who he’d been busy partnering with, “I think this guy needs some help”.
“Sebastian…” she reproached him, drawing out the end of his name.
“Lillian, you want another snort?” There was a pause.
“I could get coke from literally anyone else at this party”.
“Yeah but could you get this somewhere else?” he asked. Jason didn’t know what the context of this was, as it was obviously a visual cue.
“Probably,” Lillian replied sullenly, but within two seconds she was crawling into the stall behind Jason. He felt her hand caress his backside.
“Turn over,” she murmured and he obeyed, too shocked to do anything else. He turned over and rested his head uncomfortably against the same part of the toilet that had recently hosted his chin.
Lillian was young, probably the same age as he was, and gorgeous. She had just the right curve of cheek and chin to be striking, and her deep emerald eyes held his wavering, unsure gaze. She looked him over, and quirked her dewy red lips.
“Hey, man,” she said, and her voice was heavy, nasal and unpleasant. “Everything’s going to be alright, ok?”
“Sure,” he croaked and she undid the fly of his jeans. He closed his eyes a
nd drew in a ragged breath. He felt her hand go inside and find his stiffening member, and circle it with a professional hand. After getting him to a size of erection that he’d never considered possible, she bobbed her head down and began to blow him.
It was the singular greatest thing that he’d ever felt in his entire life. He felt a rapidly gathering force grow in his lower belly and he could imagine starbursts playing on the insides of his eyelids. He reached his hand out and put his fingers into her curly, kinky blonde hair. As a supernova seemed ready to explode within him, he grabbed her hair tightly. She took it as a sign to bob her head up and down even faster, and all of a sudden he exploded with bullet force inside of her mouth and screamed “God Sarah YES!!” Lillian reflexively swallowed and Jason felt the amazingly sensitive tip of his penis scrape the roof of her mouth down near her esophagus. She gagged slightly and Jason quickly moved himself out of her mouth. She rocked back on her heels and wiped at her mouth.
“Feel better?” she asked with a bounce to her tone. Jason gaped at her, breathing heavily. She snapped her fingers in front of his face and he recoiled, banging the back of his skull off of the hard porcelain of the toilet. She looked at him oddly, and he swallowed, hard. Now that the novelty of what had just happened was beginning to fade (although the throbbing in his groin remained, hot and urgent) the terror had begun to creep back in. His heart was pounding now, and he felt the urge to get out of the bathroom as quickly as possible. He quickly did his jeans back up and got up. He avoided looking at Lillian, who’d gotten to her feet in the meantime.
“Woah, was that your first time?” she asked, concerned and amused. Sebastian laughed nastily. Jason pushed past Lillian and tried to leave the bathroom. Sebastian put his arm out to prevent him.
“Hey, buddy, who’s Sarah?” he asked, jocular. Jason felt his stomach rise up again, but managed to keep it down.
“My sister,” he mumbled, too tired and bewildered to do anything but tell the truth. Sebastian’s eyes went wide and Lillian made a sound of disgust behind him.
“Aw, Sebastian, he’s a fucking weirdo! You made me blow a little fucking weirdo!” she exclaimed, her horsey voice braying her dismay. Sebastian just laughed.
“Oh man, that’s priceless!” he chortled. “You always call out your sister’s name when you cum, buddy? She the only girl you’ve ever seen naked or something?”
A volcano spontaneously erupted from somewhere inside of Jason.
“GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAY!” he screamed. “YOU’RE ALL FUCKING CRAZY, JUST GET OUT OF MY WAY!”
Sebastian moved on him quicker than lightning, and Jason cowered in fear. Sebastian changed tactics and put out a comforting hand, and made soothing noises.
“Hey man, hey,” he soothed. “Just calm down, ok? It’s all cool, I’m just bustin’ your chops, you know? Just chill, ok?”
Jason’s breath began to hitch in and out and he was very suddenly fighting an apparently losing battle against crying. He felt Lillian approach him from behind and put one of her warm, supple hands on his shoulder.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” she said apologetically. “I didn’t mean anything, I’m sure you’re a nice kid”.
“I’m not a kid,” he bristled, tensing his shoulders. The hand was removed.
“Sorry, whatever,” she said flatly. Sebastian shrugged.
“Here, take this,” he told Jason, handing him something. Jason took it without thinking. “You need to calm down, guy,” Sebastian continued. Jason looked at the object and discovered it was a sugar cube, light and perfectly formed. He stared at it, confused.
“Just like in Forrest Gump,” Sebastian said, pointing to it, “that’s where I got the idea from. Been doing it this way since I was twelve”. He seemed inordinately proud of this fact and Jason smiled weakly. A quick palm to the mouth and the laced sugar cube was dissolving in his mouth. He felt a brief pang of panic about the sheer insanity of it but it was quickly washed away by a realization that it was too late for that, now.
Sebastian snapped his finger and pointed at Jason. “Gotta go find some people, bro,” he said by way of goodbye. “Catch you later, maybe. C’mon Lillian”. Pretty, twitchy Lillian exited past Jason, and gave him a brief, unknowable look as she did so. Then they were gone and Jason was alone in the bathroom. He sagged against the driers, one hand going subconsciously to his stomach.
Maneuvering Olivia through the entrance to the Drake and through the thronging crowd nearly drove Mark mad, but he and Carlos managed to see her safely through the path that Barry and Amber were creating in the past-capacity hotel. It seemed as though everyone who had survived the disappearance had followed the instructions on the posters, although Mark knew that this couldn’t possibly be the case. He knew that the actual number of attendants would be quite a bit less than he imagined, but it really seemed as though thousands of people were clogging the Drake’s various areas, and the streets around it. Its size caused him a great deal of concern, and he nervously fingered the gun that Barry had given him.
His anxiety was now being driven primarily by the massive amount of intoxicants being passed around the crowd. There was liquor everywhere, scavenged from the entire surrounding area and set up so as to be freely available to whoever wanted it. The odor of the place was overlaid by a thick blanket of various alcohol smells: juniper, cherry, the sharp tang of vodka, the low brown scent of bourbon. Half the crowd smoked carelessly rolled joints and Mark saw more than enough evidence to imagine that any kind of hard drug you could name was present and accounted for as well. Mark inspected each person that they passed closely, ready to jump if they seemed out of it enough to try anything. Carlos, by contrast, seemed to float through with an arrogant slouch, which annoyed Mark to no end.
They emerged out of a hallway into a large, opulently appointed room. It was dimly lit, like a sophisticated jazz café, although the usual tables had been removed to make room for the horde of sweaty humanity that was packed in now. The music in this room was a low, thumping hard bop, bass and saxophone entwining in a seductive, suggestive language. A number of couples were engaged in a sort of dance interpretation of it, grinding against each other with a desperation that came off of the room in waves. Like everywhere else, the stench of liquor was everywhere. Olivia wrinkled her nose, looking around for a place to sit and not finding one. Carlos bobbed his head to the frantic, nearly chaotic beat, a wide grin forming on his rough, flat face.
“Looks like this is turning into a dancehall,” Barry noted from in front of them. “So, Olivia, if you really want to dance, here we are”.
“I kind of want to sit down,” she replied, her voice sounding faded. Mark avoided an urge to look at her in concern. Barry nodded, and looked at Amber. They consulted each other non-verbally, and then Barry nodded again.
“Fuck it,” he said, “let’s try the roof”. Amber clapped her hands with undisguised glee.
“That’s exactly what I was thinking!” she exclaimed. Olivia laughed in spite of her discomfort.
“The roof?” Mark asked nervously. Barry smiled at him.
“Yeah, buddy, the roof. Safest place in the whole hotel, probably, since there’ll be less liquor and so less drunken idiots”.
“Unless the hotel catches fire,” Amber noted, a twitch to her lips. Barry stared at her with irritation.
“Yes, unless the hotel catches fire” he repeated flatly.
“I wouldn’t mind some air,” Olivia said. Carlos looked around the room wistfully; he then looked at Olivia and nodded his agreement. Mark threw up his hands.
“Fine, the roof it is, I guess. If we all fall off it’ll just be icing on the cake, really” he said darkly. Barry glanced at Olivia.
“Is he always like this?” he asked. Olivia rolled her eyes roguishly.
“Lord, yes,” she replied, “every day is a fresh batch of ways for the world to end”.
Barry grinned but it looked a bit sickly. Amber didn’t smile, and she peered around the room with a worried cut
to her expression. Olivia flushed.
“Come on,” Mark said grimly, “let’s get going. If we’re going to the roof we may as well get moving”.
The stairs to the roof were clogged and at first Mark despaired of getting up them. The people hanging out on the stairs were all drunk, drinks in hand, and engaging in loud, ragged conversation. Barry, though, cut a path up the stairway by the simple expedient of moving his jacket aside and flashing his holstered gun. Most of the people that moved out of the way did not even acknowledge them, they simply glanced at the weapon and made way. They climbed, pushed, and climbed some more; eventually Mark felt a cold breeze on his sweating, burning face and he rejoiced silently. A final push and they were through, standing uncertainly in the blinding new darkness of the rooftop of the hotel, breathing in the delicious cool air and trying to get their bearings.
The roof itself was possibly the least-populated part of the entire hotel. There was still a sizeable crowd, but the area lacked the shoulder-to-shoulder cramming that characterized the smaller areas of the hotel. Mark saw that even here there was a makeshift bar set up, dispensing both the ubiquitous bottled liquor but also draft beer. He didn’t want to think about the amount of labor that would have been involved in rolling those kegs up the narrow stairwell that they’d just passed through.
“Feel that air!” Olivia exclaimed, and Barry stretched.
“Pretty cramped in that stairwell,” he observed mildly, “think I’ll go get myself a drink”. He walked away, and Amber followed. Carlos lingered for a moment and then headed towards the bar as well. Olivia and Mark were left by the roof’s entrance, standing somewhat awkwardly looking around.