Disappearance

by Trevor Zaple

  Now, however, she had failed to rematerialize, and Barry was obviously worse for it. Mark’s thoughts drifted to Olivia sleeping upstairs, and his heart went out to the young Vietnamese man.

  “I should have gone with her,” Barry said in a low voice, and Mark put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Then you might both be gone,” he replied soothingly, “and we’d be in a predicament then”. Barry turned around, fear, tension, and low anger playing leapfrog with his expression. His face hardened as he stared at Mark.

  “Why didn’t you volunteer?” he seethed. Mark was taken aback.

  “Who the hell would look after Olivia then?” he spat, surprised. Barry snorted contemptuously.

  “Amber, obviously,” he replied. “She’s been doing most of the work, after all”.

  Mark’s face reddened, and he felt his jaw tighten. “What kind of bullshit is this?” he raged, his voice getting loud despite an effort to keep control. “I’ve been worrying myself down to the bone for her, ever since the power went out, and now I’ve got you standing here telling me I’m not pulling my own weight?”

  “Yeah, buddy, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. I’m telling you that it should be you out there missing, instead of her”

  Mark’s fists clenched. “Yeah?” he yelled, the control on his anger finally slipping. “Yeah? Well I’m standing here telling you that maybe you should try sucking my dick instead of standing there like a lost little puppy waiting for its master to come home”.

  Mark knew it was coming but took Barry’s inevitable knuckles-to-chin shot with full grace. He came back with a blow to the stomach that he decided to pull slightly at the last moment. The breath woofed out of Barry and he went back against the window with a loud clang. His face screwed up in pain and Mark took a step back to assess the situation. Barry leaped forward with shocking speed and buried his head in Mark’s solar plexus. They both went sprawling off of the stage, tangled together, their blind fists striking out at anything they could find. Blows rained upon chins, jaws, arms, legs, soft flesh in stomachs. Eventually Mark, taller and weightier than Barry (although the Vietnamese man’s slim build belied a surfeit of hard muscle), was able to wrestle himself into a dominant position. He pulled a punch at Barry’s jaw and reared back to gauge how much fight the man had left in him. When Barry refrained from moving, Mark let up and rose slowly off him. He got to a safe distance before Barry got up, his hand rubbing his jaw.

  “I guess I had that coming,” Barry said, the ghost of a smile flitting across his face. Mark nodded but didn’t say anything in reply. His fists ached all at once and his body hurt from where Barry had struck him. He felt better, though, as if all of the tension had drained out of him in the fight. Barry was looking looser as well, and a smile was actually starting to form on his thin lips. He spun quickly and rammed his fist into one of the columns that graced the corners of the bar. The strike reverberated throughout the column and Mark heard it echo through the ceiling. Dust settled down from above and Mark glanced nervously to see if any cracking damage had been done. Barry stepped away from the column, shaking his hand and wincing in pain.

  “You okay?” Mark asked, trying to tonally assure the other man that he understood. Barry nodded, and then shook his head a moment later.

  “No, fuck. Shouldn’t have done that”.

  “Probably not,” Mark replied dryly.

  “Fuck,” Barry muttered again. He cradled his injured hand with his good hand. There was a creak on the stairwell that shot off like a thundercrack in the silence. Both of them turned to see Olivia sneaking around the corner. When she saw the two of them standing there she stood up straight, her hands going to the small of her back with a grimace. Her belly floated before her like a herald.

  “What’s going on down here?” she asked, sleepy and confused. Barry and Mark glanced at each other, ruefully and then with a shared chuckle.

  “Uh, nothing much, Liv,” Barry assured her, “just letting off some steam, more than anything else”.

  Olivia stared the pair of them down, her face radiating clear disbelief. She took in Barry’s limp hand and walked towards him.

  “What’s wrong with your hand?” she asked, her voice dangerous. Barry stepped back and licked his lips.

  “Nothin’, ma’am,” he said, keeping his voice light and affecting a Western accent. “Just a bruise”.

  “Uh-huh,” was the whole of Olivia’s reply. She darted forward and grabbed the wrist of his bad hand. He grunted with sudden surprised pain but did not resist her examination. Her long, cold fingers poked at the injured area.

  “One of your knuckles looks like it’s dislocated, it might even be broken. Do you know how to set a broken hand?” she asked angrily.

  “Uh, no,” Barry stammered, “no I don’t”.

  “Neither do I,” she seethed, and let his hand drop. “Which is why I have to question what the fuck you thought you were doing?”

  Barry held her gaze with that inscrutable Asian calm he always managed to dig up at the right moment. He shrugged his shoulders and quirked his lips.

  “Guess I was just showing my frustration,” he said flippantly. Olivia looked at him, disgusted. She turned her vicious gaze towards Mark, who physically shied back.

  “Look, I,” he began before she cut him off.

  “What do you think you’re doing? Fighting with our friends? With the only people we can even trust right now?”

  Mark slumped and hung his head.

  “You’re right,” he muttered. He looked up warily at Barry, whose face remained neutral. “Sorry I goaded you into it,” he apologized, his voice low and resistant. Barry cracked a grin.

  “No problem,” he replied. “Sorry I practically made you do it,”

  Olivia looked at them both with disappointment. “Wanna tell me why you were beating on each other?”

  Barry turned around and walked back to the window that faced the rainswept stretch of Queen. He placed a palm back on the waiting glass.

  “Amber’s still not back,” he said, for the second time. Olivia put a hand to her mouth.

  “Oh my,” she exclaimed, and then seemed to shake it off. “I’m sure she took shelter in one of the apartments out there to wait out the rain”.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Barry replied, his voice heavily laden with disbelief.

  “Well,” Olivia continued, determined now to lift his spirits no matter what, “once Carlos wakes up maybe he can go scout the area and help her out if she needs it”.

  “I already sent him out,” he whispered, and Mark let out a gasp.

  “What?” he exclaimed. Barry slapped his hand loudly against the pane of glass. A low rumble of thunder followed this from outside.

  “I sent him out twenty minutes after Amber left, last night,” he said, louder and slower. “I didn’t trust her, didn’t want to see her…anyway, it doesn’t matter. I sent him out to keep an eye on her and now neither of them are here”.

  Nobody spoke. There was nothing that could be said. Mark and Olivia retired to their upstairs room, and Barry remained downstairs, watching the street drown in a slick curtain of rainwater.

  They managed to catch an afternoon nap of perhaps a couple of hours or so before they were awoken by a commotion from downstairs. Mark awoke to a loud bang, but couldn’t wrap his mind around it until he heard the panicked shouting. He leaped from the bed and grabbed his shirt, rounding out the door as Olivia sat up, yelling something incomprehensible after him. He pounded down the stairs and caught Amber’s voice amongst the shouting. Flooded with relief, he hit the bottom of the stairs with a jump and rounded 180 degrees towards the bar. Barry and Amber were crouched over a figure that was laid out on the floor. Barry had looked up as he heard Mark hit the bottom of the stairs and was now motioning frantically for Mark to join them.

  They were crouched over Carlos, who had been wrapped in a yellow plastic poncho, the kind that had been at one time sold in every high-volume convenience store in the city
. Underneath was the vague shape of something thick wrapped around his lower torso. His face was contorted in a rictus of pain, his eyes closed and his mouth drawn up in a snarl. Rain soaked his face, making him look greasy and sweaty in the thin light of the hurricane lanterns hung over the bar.

  “What happened?” he breathed. Amber looked at him and he saw with dismay that she had an angry red line drawn down the left side of her pretty face, going from the roots of her faded blonde hair to the exquisite curve of her petite chin. It seemed like an offense that hung in the air just before her, an insult to everything that could be said to be right in Mark’s world. Her eyes were cold, and hard.

  “He was stabbed,” she said flatly. “Stabbed by a fucking drugged-out cannibal asshole near King Street”.

  Mark rocked back and found himself flat on his ass. He blinked at her, uncomprehending.

  “He was what?” he stumbled, feeling stupid and yet unable to help it. She rolled her eyes.

  “Just help, and I’ll tell you after, okay?” she ordered, hot angry contempt spicing her voice. Mark nodded emphatically.

  “We’ll get him up the stairs,” he said quickly, “to one of the empty bedrooms. Get him unwrapped and look him over”.

  Barry nodded decisively. “Good idea,” he concluded, and moved to pick up Carlos’ upper half by his armpits. Mark moved a second later to his ankles, and within a moment they had him lifted and moving towards the stairs. They rounded up and began to climb. Mark saw Olivia at the top of the stairwell, her face hidden in shadow but worry and fear obvious even for that.

  “Go lie down, Olivia,” he said tiredly. They climbed up the stairs roughly, Carlos’ dead weight slowing them to a crawl. She disappeared from Mark’s field of vision and he dug into the task at hand. They made it, with agonizing slowness, to the top of the stairs and hustled him down the dark, narrow corridor. The low, outrageously cheerful bounce of Emily’s chanson music played on from her room.

  The room beside Mark and Olivia’s was empty and they trundled Carlos into the bed that was in it. Mark and Barry worked to gently unwrap the short man from his yellow plastic wrap and it lay like an overlarge sheet underneath him. With the poncho off, Mark could see that the lumpy shape that had been underneath was in fact a wad of facecloths affixed with wide industrial strips of duct tape. Red Green would be proud Mark thought crazily. Barry produced a pocket knife and began to carefully cut the strips of tape away. The facecloths came off with a slight, sticky pause, and the wound was at last visible.

  It was ugly, that was the first thing that Mark noted about it. The wound was four inches above his hip bone, in the bottom left of his abdomen. It was small but it looked deep, and the blood had clotted dark around it.

  “There’s peroxide and gauze in the basement,” Barry said uneasily, and left quickly to track it down. Amber and Mark looked at the unconscious man, neither of them sure of what to say. Carlos continued breathing, his chest rising and falling, although it seemed terribly shallow to Mark. Finally he had to break the silence, unable to stomach another quiet moment in what seemed like a deathroom, listening to Carlos’ breath hitch in and out, and the rain falling on the street below like a secret, whispering army.

  “What happened?” he asked, his voice shaking. Amber coughed, and her fingers went unconsciously to the wound running like a jagged, deep trench down her face.

  “Carlos caught up with me at the bank, the one on the corner of Jameson, just as I was about to turn down the street. Scared the shit out of me, but I forgave him for that. Don’t really forgive Barry for sending him out after me, but I guess that’s a battle for another time. We went and started rummaging through the apartments although it looks like some other people might have gotten the same idea at some point—they looked pretty picked over, anyway. Still, I managed to get a backpack full of canned food and Carlos had one with water bottles he’d scavenged, although…” she shrugged. “We were coming up to the King Street intersection and we’d gone into one of the buildings—the short one, six stories and stone balconies?” When Mark didn’t show a sign of recognition she continued. “Anyway, we busted into that one and started poking around the rooms. We hadn’t found anyone living in any of the others, although there had been signs that people had been there up until not long ago. That building, though…” her mouth screwed up to the point that Mark thought that she was about to spit. “That one had a few fucks in it, on the second floor. We busted into the one apartment and they were waiting for us. Three of them, two black guys and a white dude, all of them dirty and stringy. They had kitchen knives, but it looked like they’d spent some time sharpening them”. She paused for a moment. “A lot of time. Anyway, they sprang at us, stabbing. I had my gun in my hand, always do when we’re out, but Carlos had left his in the holster and wasn’t able to get it out in time. I shot one of the black guys right away, right in the face,” she seemed viciously glad to rehash that detail, “but the white kid got past me and his knife went right into Carlos, right in. Like, up to the hilt”. She shuddered. “Thank god it was just a little one”. She pursed her lips, as though trying to push the next words out of her gullet. “They had…things hanging in their kitchen. Parts. With the skin off, hanging from the ceiling. There was garbage knocked over, by the entrance, and there were bones in it. Human bones. There were teeth marks in them, I saw that, saw it bright and clear. They’d been gnawing on them. For a moment, I could see myself being chopped up like a lamb, skinned and chopped and divided into parts. This one for roasting, this one for stewing”. She smiled without mirth, her lips pulling back from her teeth. “This one for jerky,” she whispered. Mark put a steadying hand on her shoulder and she flinched back, her eyes blazing.

  “They were eating people, do you not understand that?” she wailed. “They were going to eat us!”. Mark huddled ineffectually near her, simply nodding his morose agreement. Barry returned, a dirty white first-aid kit clutched in his hands. He wasted no time, kneeling beside the bed and cracking the case open. He took out a pair of scissors, gauze, thread, and a small bottle of hydrogen peroxide. He looked at Mark and Amber, shook his head, and began to work. Olivia came in as he was unscrewing the cap from the peroxide bottle and puncturing the seal. She took in the situation, saw Amber’s panic and Mark’s paralyzed discomfort, and calmly took the situation in hand. Barry applied the peroxide carefully to the wound, wincing as he saw it bubble cruelly. Olivia calmly measured out gauze and put thread to needle. She eyed him for a moment, gauging how unconscious he was, and then deftly began to sew the wound closed. Barry gawked at her as she did so, and Amber was openly impressed. Mark said nothing, watching the procedure blackly. Within minutes Olivia had the incision sewed up, and she stepped back to check over her handiwork. Mark roused himself and checked Carlos’ forehead with the back of his hand.

  “I think he’s running a fever,” he said, to no one in particular. Amber chewed her lip nervously.

  “Those assholes were filthy,” she spat. “There could have been anything on those knives”. She was shaking now, becoming overcome by the horrors she’d seen. Barry went to her, comforted her. She accepted the attempt, although she didn’t seem at all comforted.

  “Is there any Tylenol in the house, Barry?” Olivia asked levelly. Barry thought about it for a moment.

  “I think, maybe in the basement office, but there’s aspirin in the box”.

  Olivia shook her head. “No, we need Tylenol to bring down the fever. The only thing that aspirin will do is thin out his blood and maybe kill him”.

  Barry nodded curtly and set out once again for the basement. Amber looked at Olivia, obviously impressed.

  “Why didn’t you ever become a nurse?” she asked, her voice awed. Olivia shrugged, her manner small in a way that Mark had never really seen it before.

  “I don’t really know, I thought publishing would be wonderful and lucrative, although it turns out the opposite is true. No one wants to publish anything unless it’s aimed square at the broad
middle and will sell to housewives across the heartland”. She looked at Mark and her expression was unreadable. “I guess, once you think you’ve met the right person, everything else kind of slides out of view”. Her hand went subconsciously to her belly and Mark wanted nothing more at that moment than to reach out and hold her. He stayed where he was, feeling about as miserable as he ever had. If he could have traveled back in time to meet his previous self, he would have cheerfully shot the bastard and watched him die. Olivia motioned to Carlos’ sleeping form.

  “We’ll watch him through the night and see how he comes out of it”. She looked at Amber. “How did you even get him back here?”

  Amber snorted. “That damned handcart of his, I sort of draped him over it once I’d dragged him down to the street. Thank god he’s so short, I never would have been able to do it otherwise. He was pretty much out of it by the time we were a block away from the place, and he passed out cold as we were passing by the high school, you know the one a block from Queen?” Olivia nodded. “Well, it was around there that I noticed he’d stopped muttering. I was afraid he was dead”. Her shaking picked up intensity and she finally burst into tears. Olivia picked herself up and went to comfort the slight woman, her gigantic pregnant form seeming to envelop Amber. Mark shifted awkwardly.