by Trevor Zaple
“Are you going to get something to drink?” she asked him, and he shrugged nonchalantly.
“I’ll go when one of them comes back,” he replied simply, and that ended the conversation before it was fairly begun. They both shuffled their feet. Olivia walked away without warning, towards the edge of the roof. Mark had a brief moment of panic before realizing that there was a low, white wall built up three feet high around the edge of the roof. Olivia walked up to this wall and put her palms on the top of it, resting her pregnant belly against it. Mark followed her, taking a place to her right. He leaned over and folded his arms atop the wall. Neither of them said a word, but instead listened to the rumble of the crowd on the street below, and looked out over the trench that Queen cut in the forest of buildings. Most of the buildings on Queen were lit up, and in the taller skyscrapers that they could see, he could see lights burning in about a quarter of the windows. Beyond that, though, there was darkness. There were areas on the horizon, highly developed areas, where there wasn’t a light to be seen at all. A chill ran up his spine as he contemplated them. A sudden urge gripped him. He got off of his elbows and put a hand over Olivia’s.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and when he saw the old hurt anger passing over her face again he made himself continue. “I’m sorry for everything. For cheating on you, for not putting up a fight for what we had—what we have,” he glanced at the hard jut of her belly, “together. I’m sorry things turned out like that”. Her expression had softened, but the hurt still remained, drawing her eyes down into drowning depths. “I want to do right by you, by our child, and I can think of no better time to do that than right now”. He gestured with his free hand over the sparsely lit expanse of formerly packed urban area. “We’re not exactly living in normal times, here. I know that, before, you were determined to do it on your own, and you could have. God knows that you didn’t need me before”. A smile ghosted Olivia’s lips. “It’s a different world, though,” he continued, “and somehow we both found ourselves stuck in it. I want to stand by you, and raise our child. Together”. He held up a finger to stave off the objections that he could see bubbling up in her face. “You don’t have to love me,” he said, even though it felt like a serrated knife twisting in his intestines. “You just have to accept my help. Deal?”
Olivia looked into his eyes and her expression was guarded. Mark felt his pulse pick up. He felt as though he were being weighed on a scale. Then the clouds in her gaze broke and her eyes seemed to shine.
“Deal,” she agreed, and spat in her free palm. Mark grinned and spat in his own palm. They shook, their other hands still entwined on the top of the wall, both of them grinning like drunken fools. Afterward, neither of them spoke, but looked out over the darkened remains of a formerly thriving city instead, watching shadows move imperceptibly on the edge of their field of vision.
Whatever drug had been slipped to Jason was taking an exacting toll on him. There were definite hallucinations involved; he’d discovered that shortly after stumbling out of the bathroom on unsteady feet, his head growing cloudy and the ephemeral remains of Lillian’s lips throbbing on his groin. He put out a hand to the wall that ran along the hallway and saw half an inch of his hand disappear into it. He goggled at this site and then pulled his hand back in alarm, convinced that it had melted. It looked normal, however, and after staring at it expectantly for several seconds he continued on his way.
His need to get out of the basement was near-absolute. The air had grown foul, he thought, toxic and choking. If he stayed down there a moment longer, he thought that his lungs might simply collapse in protest. The others could stay down there and die, he would take his chances with whatever lay above him. The stairs at the end of the hallway seemed to go on forever, and also seemed to grow narrower the further up them he climbed. By the time he got to the top he was gasping for air, as though he’d just finished climbing a particularly tall mountain in record time. There was a sallow, thin man with two faces, each growing out of his head about six inches apart and staring off into different directions. He quailed away from this mutant freak and stumbled out into the hotel’s lobby. There was a steady crowd there, clumping together and drinking, but their speech came in wide, nauseating waves. He caught about a third of what everyone was saying, which was enough to cause it to jumble together in his mind and piece itself together in odd, sweaty sentences that seemed like broken fragments of a madman’s rant.
Do you feel like the doom of an old engine parked by the intersection of places and faces with the one guy who came with a rubber dome and bow like a supplicant to the sun and he ran, his feet tripping over themselves in their hurry to get away, to find somewhere quiet, to get away from the maddening nonsensical drawl that assaulted his mind in a tide. He pushed past the delirious attendants and made his way into the classy, jazzy ballroom where his skewed perspective caught on a group of dancers that seemed to shimmer in the dim electric light. They were wrapped in diaphanous silk shawls that undulated like a snake shedding skin, writhing to a beat that seemed to flow like liquid through the crowd. He felt that beat pound its way through his ears like the spray over a grey breakwater, felt it flow inwards and soak his brain. It was all he could hear; four deep beats per bar, thudding and primeval. It gave off sparks, electric synth fills that crackled along its essential trunk, shocking Jason each time like a static discharge. He felt as though he were undergoing a low-level electric shock therapy simply by standing in the room. The crowd seemed as fixated on the dancers as he was; all of them were facing the wide circle that had been created for them, dancing in their own rights but only vaguely, as though they were afraid to completely lose themselves in the music and thereby diminish the powers that these rippling dancers possessed.
Jason’s vision split, then quadrupled, and then quadrupled again. He had sight like a fly; he saw sixty-four versions of the dancers, each differing in angle in so slight a manner as to make him believe that they might be the same. They began to drop the shawls, exposing vital, living skin that seemed like fresh mountain air for his eyes. He saw the skin and saliva flooded into his mouth, and the ache in his groin intensified, seeming to drown out every other signal that his twirling brain was sending out. He watched them reveal themselves into nudity, watched the shining pieces of silk flutter away into the crowd, and felt an urge to join them. He pushed his way through the crowd, ignoring any protests he encountered from his sharp-elbowed method, and made his way to the edge of the circle that surrounded them.
They seemed perfect. Two men and three women, their eyes closed, their bodies lightly covered in a sweat that could have been a fine European oil. One of the men had a chiseled, sculpted muscle form, and the other was much more average, with a slight paunch and a light flabbiness to his arms. The women were just as varied—two of them were curved and soft, their forms moving seemingly of their own accord in timed accompaniment to their skeletal movements. The third kept the time with just her skeleton; her ribs stuck out and her legs were coltish, although her cheeks, lips, and behind all bespoke of her having eaten regularly. All five were dancing with their eyes closed, their faces composed in contentment. Jason watched them, and then began to slowly back away from the edge of the circle. They were perfect; he was not. He became suddenly self-conscious of his roundness, of his shapeless torso and overfed face. He felt graceless and leaden, and the further he pushed through the crowd the more panicked he became. He heard the crowd whispering about him. They were pointing out every last flaw he possessed, pointing them out and laughing at him behind their hands. They were grinning furtively and their faces began to take on animalistic overtones—weasels, foxes, wolves, chittering monkeys. The room smelled like a zoo, he realized with a start. He was trapped in the animal pen at a zoo, and they were all discussing his flesh. His tasty, bountiful flesh. How they could just tear into his soft stomach, and devour his innards like aristocrats at a feast. He would be their roasting pig, and they were slathering saliva over themselves and the
floor in anticipation of it. He saw flashes from the corners of his eyes—they were already pulling out the knives. He broke into a run, knocking people out of the way. A number of people swore at him, and he heard it as the crass screaming of thwarted beasts.
He spun on his heel in the lobby and took the stairs. He needed to get up, up into the places where animals would never go. He took a staircase up to the rooming floor, where he collapsed on the flat, deeply crimson carpet. He panted until it felt like there was a vacuum forming in his lungs. He heaved at the air, clawing for oxygen. He looked up wildly and saw a supple willow tree making out with a bored wolverine in a leather jacket. It’s Sebastian and Lillian, he thought, and each word seemed to languidly explode in his head like a firecracker. They’ve come to eat me. Fuck me and eat me.
“Stop tormenting me,” he croaked and stumbled past them. They said something in reply once he had passed them but it didn’t register on him. He lurched down the dimly lit hall, passing by rows of doorways, some of them open to the world. He saw groups of two-legged animals, snorting and sticking and smoking and engaging in mass acts of brute, mindless sex. He became aware of a steady drumbeat, a reverb-laden bass drum beating a solid four-on-the-floor, and he began to think that each beat was ripping a hole in the ceiling, letting in eldritch moonlight that cast a lurid glow on what he spied. The laughter he heard from these rooms was raucous, and once, a beckoning, serpentine woman called to him, telling him of all the filthy, pornographic things that would happen to him if he would just stay. He fled, gibbering in nameless fear.
He found the narrow staircase to the roof after what seemed like months of running. The people jamming the stairs were dogs, all of them, their tongues lolling as they spoke and their tails wagging as exclamation marks. They paid no attention to him as he climbed past them, except to yip at him if he was too rough in pushing through. Within moments he was through the small doorway in the top. He collapsed onto the rough, gravelly surface of the roof and vomited pure light that splashed in every direction as it left his raw mouth.
“Aw, fuck!” a badger exclaimed from in front of him. “My shoes!”
“Someone get a mop!” someone yelled from the bar. Loud, drunken laughter followed this.
“Is he alright?” a filthy, misshapen goat asked. A donkey brayed laughter, his mindless yellow eyes staring up at the star-bestrewn blackness above. A hawk with a taut, statuesque female body clucked her beak disapprovingly. Her hard black eyes bored into his skull and Jason knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that she could read every thought that went through his head.
“Mark, are you going to get a drink yet?” the hawk asked the donkey. The donkey brayed into the night again and loped away towards the bar.
“What about the kid? Is he going to be alright?” asked the most lilting, musical voice he’d ever heard. He turned his head, not feeling the stream of drool fall out of his mouth, and beheld the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. She was entirely, utterly human, and obviously so. She glowed with a white aura, like a halo around the moon, and it seemed to be strongest around her pregnant belly. It called to him, a chorus of cartoon angels blowing horns and singing him into the golden gates of a suburb of Heaven. Her face was ageless, heart-shaped and possessed of the kind of beauty that could lead to cardiac arrest. He stared up at her, entranced by the twinkling white light that issued from her, every detail of her being etched like a laser engraving behind his eyelids. He let his head droop to the ground in supplication.
“My lady…” he wheezed. “My life…”
“Alright, pal, alright, get a move on,” a grating, groaning voice said, and he felt the toe of a pair of heavy work boots gently nudge into his side. He collapsed and rolled over, the gritty surface of the roof digging into his back painfully.
“Wha?” he stammered, blinking up into the moonlight and trying to figure out who was talking to him. A dark shape, a horse shape, loomed over him.
“I think you’ve had enough, friend,” the shadowy horse told him conversationally. “Probably time to hit the hay, whaddya think?” The boot went into his side again, less gently this time. He took the hint.
As he scrambled to his feet, the pregnant angel demurely protested his treatment.
“I think he’s just disoriented,” she said, her voice ringing with the tone of truth and righteousness. The donkey brayed once more, and Jason thought that he could almost decipher what it was that the animal meant. The sooty-grey goat with the shit-encrusted rump made a horny old sound and pointed a chipped hoof at him.
“That’s more than just disoriented, Olivia,” the goat said, by way of reply to the angel, “that’s a powerful dose of something fun and chemical”.
“He’s probably scared,” the angel said, compassion and sympathy riding the sound of her voice like honey and ambrosia. The hawk clicked her beak, and adjusted her tight green dress.
“What did I say?” the shadow horse demanded, and Jason fled that voice, back into the sweltering, claustrophobic stairwell. He sobbed his way through the crowd, many of whom shrank back from him in disgust. He thought they were growling at him, nice-looking dogs suddenly gone mean, their eyes growing flatter and their tails wagging sharper. He jumped the last three stairs, landing in a heap in the middle of the floor and knocking himself into a daze.
When he came to he saw that the animal visions were gone; the people carousing in the hallway were very human, although most were behaving like animals. A nude woman with pierced nipples and a blue-green tattoo on her right hip was standing outside of the closest room on the right. She was smoking a cigarette and watching him. He felt like he could read her thoughts. She was appraising him, finding him wanting. She saw a fat, disoriented kid, probably stupid, definitely packing very little in the pants. He glared up at her, his teeth slowly clenching together.
“You wanna get laid, kid?” the woman asked, and Jason blinked with confusion.
“Right here?” he asked, and the woman spewed out laughter and acrid smoke.
“No, not right here,” she said, amused. She gestured to the closed door of the room with her thumb. “In there”.
Jason got to his feet, teetering a little, and brushed himself off.
“What’s going on in there?” he asked suspiciously. She shrugged prettily, and suddenly that flaring urgency was flashing in his groin again. He remembered Lillian, as if from some long-ago dream, and the largest erection he could remember started forming inside of his dirty jeans. She took a drag of her cigarette and did not follow up this gesture with a verbal response. Jason stared at her for a moment, licking his lips, and then barged past her, thrusting the door open.
The scene inside was like something out of a celebration of Pan. There were at least a dozen people inside, none of them wearing clothes, all of them engaging in contortions of sexual congress. There were two beds in the room, and there were three people on each, licking and sucking and thrusting and grabbing. A man immediately to Jason’s left was on his knees blowing a large, grey-haired man who was standing with his hands behind his head. A blonde girl was straddling a man on the rough-covered sofa, arched over with her head leaning on the wall. She seemed only semi-conscious; the ratty, bucktoothed man underneath seemed to be doing all the work. A stoned-looking redhead whose breasts drooped down exaggeratedly was rubbing the out-of-it girl’s back, whispering about how well she was doing, about how sexy she was.
The ratty man eventually grew disgusted as Jason watched. He pushed her up with his hands and the redhead grappled her arms to help lift her off. The man wiped his mouth, spun the blonde girl around roughly, and pushed her onto the edge of a bed. The top of her head rammed into the ankles of a heavily tattooed woman who was going down on another woman who was busy orally pleasuring a greying athletic man. None of them paused in what they were doing. The blonde girl lay where she fell, bent over the edge of the bed with her legs slowly spreading apart.
“You wanna turn, buddy,” the ratty man asked, gesturing at Jason
and sounding somewhat hostile, “or do you just wanna watch some more?” The redhead smiled emptily and crooked a badly lacquered finger at him.
“Come and get it…” she drawled, her voice like slush. He felt his engorged member throb mightily and his hands went to the zipper of his jeans. There was no one to stop him. No one to step in and say hey now, this doesn’t seem right, what’s the legal status of this situation. What was morality in a world of the dead? He saw the rest of the world outside of this room flake away, aging a thousand decades in an instant and rusting into entropy. This room alone remained, vital and alive, a final testament to the living universe. He felt as though he had been born specifically for this moment, this room. His thrumming cock agreed.
He walked forward, his abused vision beginning to strobe with the hot, urgent music being played on an expensive iPod dock on the night table. He saw himself walking past entwined animal lust. He saw himself approach the dazed woman’s white, smooth, goose-prickled flesh. Saw himself grabbing her round, full buttocks with a heavy grip. Saw himself spread her apart, saw himself slide himself in. She was slick and loose, the muscles that might have tensed and tightened deliciously around him sleeping. He thrust slowly at first. He felt little; Lillian’s mouth had provided more resistance than this. He sneered and thrust harder, reveling in the freedom from having to obey. Freedom from having to follow rules, morality, vague codes that kept him from acting however he chose. He began slamming himself into her, gripping her buttocks until his fingers went white. The woman began moaning and moving her head around; he grimaced and then his hand darted forward and he grabbed a handful of blonde hair. She groaned in pain and it made Jason thrust harder. He’d never felt this large, this strong, or this alive. He felt her try to buck away from him and he couldn’t help but grin. It only made him want to grind her harder. He let go of her hair and she groggily twisted her head to try to look at him. Mid-thrust he realized that it was Sarah. He was raping his own sister.