by Peter Clines
The Junkie Quatrain
Peter Clines
Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.
Copyright 2011 Peter Clines.
www.PermutedPress.com
Cover art by Zach McCain.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Codependent
Predator and Prey
Confidentiality
Strictly Professional
INTRODUCTION
The Junkie Quatrain grew out of an email I got back in January of 2011 from publisher Jacob Kier. He’d secured a deal with Audible.com for several Permuted Press books to be recorded and released in audio format, two of which were mine. One of them I’d only finished writing a week or so earlier. Then Stephen Feldberg at Audible.com approached Jacob with the idea of bonus content for some of the releases. People would get the Permuted novel they paid for, plus part of another post-apocalyptic novella or maybe a short story. My name came up in the discussion and Jacob asked me if I’d be interested.
The big catch was that all this material needed to be produced on a pretty tight deadline. Audible.com wanted to start releasing their versions of the books over that summer, and they’d need time to cast and record the material once it was written. Could I create these new stories in, say, five or six weeks?
Now, on that note, let’s have a moment of frank honesty between you and me. I am the worst person for this kind of offer. I’ve never been good at writing anything clever on command. Oh, I can sit down at the desk and make myself pound out two or three thousand words a day with no problem. That’s what five years of journalism (even softer, entertainment-oriented journalism) does for you. You want a book—I can do that. You need a short story—no problem.
What I’ve never been that good at, when it comes to fiction, is writing specific things. If you want a buddy-cop novel where they’re solving the murder of a mad scientist in a steampunk world ... well, that’s probably going to throw me. I’ve never been too happy with anything that I wrote for a specific theme or niche. There are some folks who dominate that anthology/ magazine market where you have to write to a certain target. I’m not one of them.
What did catch my third eye, though, was the idea of short stories that weren’t a series but just loosely connected. I spent a few weeks thinking about it and came up with the idea of something in the vein of Paul Haggis’s Crash or Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. And maybe even a little bit like the Akira Kurosawa classic Rashomon.
I also liked the idea of a very recent apocalypse. So many stories—my own Ex-Heroes series included—concentrate on what happens after the end. People hole up somewhere, maybe they go into a coma, and by the time they come out things are already pretty much over. We don’t see much of the collapse. The light is on and then the light is off. How often do we linger on that time when the bulb is dim and flickering?
And then, in that bizarre way things happen inside the heads of people like me, these two ideas twisted together and formed a world.
Now, as Bill Cosby might say, I told you all that so I can tell you this...
The stories here are not meant to be read in any particular order, because they were intended to be assigned to different Audible.com releases. In fact, it was kind of a painstaking process to make sure each of them was independent of the others.
This caused a problem, though, once Permuted Press decided to release The Junkie Quatrain as an e-book. Which order should we choose for that assembled manuscript? They had a certain release order from Audible.com, but the stories each reveal different clues and hints, so reading them in different orders makes for a very different experience. Yeah, sure, we all like to say we’re clever and independent of such things, but let’s be honest one more time. The moment I say ‘Strictly Professional’ should be the first story in the ebook, from here on it is the first story in The Junkie Quatrain. No matter what order people first heard them in, the vast majority of folks will go back into iTunes and reorganize their Audible play list to reflect the order here. And that defeats the whole point of this little experiment.
In the end, this conflict was solved in the same way most geek-related problems are solved.
I rolled some dice.
You can read these stories in the order they appear here, but I encourage you to roll dice yourself. Or flip coins. Maybe ask your Magic 8-Ball or let the computer shuffle that above-mentioned play list. Y’see, reading these stories in various orders may give you different takes on what happens next to some of these characters.
I say some because... well, again, let’s be honest.
Not all of them will be making it out of this alive.
—P.C.
Los Angeles, August 5th, 2011
CODEPENDENT
Six months ago, the world ended.
For Holly, it had only been six weeks.
It was morning and her feet hurt, but she was used to it by now. Downtown Los Angeles loomed a few miles to the north, which meant she’d walked almost a hundred and forty miles so far. She was glad she’d dumped her sneakers for a pair of solid hiking boots.
She walked up the middle of the road. It made her more visible, but also gave her a clear line of sight to everything else. She’d tried skulking in alleys and between cars for the first few days, the way an outsider would, and it just hadn’t worked.
Besides, with no cars running, it was amazing how quiet things were.
Holly looked back and forth, listened for a moment, then looked around again. She carefully set her baseball bat down. It was an aluminum one—a cheater’s bat, her husband had joked back when he was just her boyfriend—with cloth tape around the handle and a dull blue practice weight fitted around the end. She’d cleaned it off half an hour ago, right after using it, but the weighted donut had some sticky spots on it that looked black against the blue. It gave a faint clink as it touched the pavement and she leaned the shaft against her thigh.
She shifted her backpack with a tug on the shoulder straps. Another two or three hours would get her into downtown. Then maybe she’d find a sanctuary. If not, Los Angeles had lots of cars to sleep in. And enough stores to scavenge some food.
A rustle of leaves, or maybe old papers, echoed down the street.
She spun and knocked the bat over. Her fingers caught it before it clattered on the pavement. She inched it away from the ground, her knuckles white on the handle.
The noise happened again. And a slapping sound. Shoes hitting pavement.
A mail truck was parked across the bike lane to her right. She moved until it was between her and the sound. If she pressed her head against the back of the truck, she could look right through the chrome handle there and stay almost hidden.
Another two footsteps clapped out from somewhere ahead. Then a third.
Holly flattened herself against the truck. She took the bat in her left hand. Her right dropped to her holster. Her fingers rested on the strap across the Beretta. The snap caught on her fingernails and she pried it back until it was ready to pop open.
Half a block down the street, a pair of junkies stumbled out from behind a parked SUV. A middle-aged man and a woman. Their matching clothes were streaked with filth and gore. On their gaunt frames, the shirts and pants hung like rags on a pair of scarecrows.
There were lots of polite and politically correct terms that people had been advocating since the first outbreaks at the start of the year. The afflicted. The infected. A lot of government people used them. Them was good because it created a nice separation that let you justify a lot of actions. A few uppity folks tried using the Baugh-ridden, after the pathologist who isolated the contagion after the first outbreaks. He never used the term himself. He’d died a week after identifying the virus
. Some of his new namesakes had gotten into his lab and eaten thirty-five pounds of him.
The truth was, everyone just called them junkies. They trembled. They shook. Their words were a slur of noise when they tried to speak. They didn’t so much run as throw themselves at a target. Everything they did had a frantic desperation to it.
The woman’s shoulders shivered. She let out a low groan and followed it with a stream of nonsense syllables. Even from half a block away, Holly could see their dilated eyes twitching back and forth.
The matching clothes bothered her. It meant the junkies had probably been a couple. And if they were still together, it meant there was a sliver of reasoning left in them. So they were going to be more concerned with feeding than running away.
It wasn’t a sure thing, but two months of experience told her it was a good way to bet. It fit the pattern.
The woman groaned again and took a few more steps into the road. The man stood still and Holly saw the dark stain spreading out across the crotch of his pants. A few minutes later the smell hit her, carried by the light breeze. She was lucky she was downwind of them.
There was a flutter on the edge of her vision. A pigeon flapped down out of the sky. There were still lots of birds. Not as many stray cats, though.
The junkies lunged at it. The woman grunted a few times. The man let out a flood of angry sounds.
The bird took a few hops and leaped back into the air. It wasn’t quick enough. The man swatted it to the ground and pounced on it. He ripped one of the wings off with his teeth and took the head off with the next bite. It sounded like he was eating a mouthful of potato chips.
The woman howled and gibbered at him. He pushed her back and twisted away. The bird was gone in three more bites. A few feathers clung to his lips the way they would on a cartoon cat.
She howled and hit him across the back of the head. He staggered and she struck him again. And again. Holly guessed if the male junkie had been upright it would’ve ended quickly, but he’d dropped to his knees to eat the pigeon. He was smaller now. He couldn’t assert dominance.
The woman battered him again and again. They weren’t punches, just strikes from flailing arms. But there was a savage energy to them. She was starving and he’d just eaten a meal in front of her—small and awful as it’d been.
When his head touched the pavement Holly knew it was over. The man was low enough that the woman could use her legs, too. She kicked his head and stomped on his body and bent down to claw at his face. She kept at it for five minutes after he stopped moving.
Holly watched the whole thing. She didn’t dare look away. If the female junkie spotted her now, all that frenzy would get a new target.
At some point a switch flipped and the junkie dropped to her knees and tore at the man’s cheeks. One of them came away, then his lips. She tore his shirt open and buttons pitter-pattered on the street. Her claw-like fingers punched through his stomach and came away with thick ropes of flesh. She crammed it into her mouth as fast as she could swallow.
Couplehood wasn’t what it used to be.
The woman would probably eat for half an hour. Holly could be long gone by then. She pushed herself away from the mail truck. A quick glance told her the ground was clean—this would be a bad time to step on some old flyers or broken glass—and she set her foot down behind her. Another foot back. A third. And a fourth.
She looked up and craned her neck to peer around the truck. The junkie almost had her back to Holly. She was still cramming meat into her mouth.
Holly pulled a breath in through her nose, held it, and took three sideways strides into the alley between two shops. Her fingers tightened on the bat as she listened for the sound of the junkie’s shoes slapping on the pavement.
Nothing. Just the wet sounds of hunger.
The alley came out into a small parking lot surrounded by chain link fences. There was another avenue between the buildings on the far side of the lot. She moved out into the next street.
* * *
She walked for another hour. A pair of sleeping junkies beneath the 10 freeway caused a detour. A handful of half-eaten bodies spread across the road caused another. Death was commonplace, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with.
The sun was high in the sky when she heard the gasp.
Holly had stopped to tighten one of her boot laces when there was a sharp intake of air off to her side. The road was narrower here, more so because of the cars parked on either side. There was a mini-van with an open side door. She’d ignored it because junkies couldn’t stand confined spaces. Stupid mistake.
She threw herself to the ground, away from the mini-van, and reached for the holster. There was no time for the bat. There might not even be time to draw.
The other woman saw the holster and threw her hands in the air. ‘Don’t shoot,’ she yelled. ‘I’m not one of them.’ The Victoria’s Secret catalog would’ve called her full-figured. Her clothes were clean and her dirty-blond hair was cut just above her shoulders.
Holly had already rolled back to her feet. She slapped her hand over the woman’s mouth and pushed her against the side of the van. Holly’s neighbors in San Diego had the same car in silver. They used to, anyway.
The woman struggled for a moment until Holly held up the bat. ‘Not a sound.’ It wasn’t even a whisper. Only the slightest breath carried the words. ‘Noise like that will bring every junkie for two blocks running.’
The woman gave a nod. She looked close to crying. Holly kept her palm over the woman’s mouth.
She counted to twenty in her head. No other sound. No hungry howls or trample of eager feet. No...
Snuffling echoed across the street, and then a grumble. A junkie climbed through the broken showcase window of a furniture store two doors down and across the street. A young man with dark skin. Maybe Latino or an Arab. He was barefoot, and his feet were covered with scabbed blood. They shifted left and right.
Beneath her palm, Holly felt the other woman scream.
The junkie’s eyes were dilated all the way open, black pits in his face. He tilted his head at the two women. He was small. And they outnumbered him. Fight or flight?
She took a gamble. Holly let go of the other woman’s mouth and turned to face the junkie. She raised the baseball bat in both hands, bared her teeth, and stomped her foot. His eyebrows went up at the noise. For a moment she thought she’d spooked him.
Then he charged.
The junkie threw himself across the street at them, gibbering madly. The woman screamed. Holly pulled the bat back, ready to swing.
A whipcrack echoed between the buildings and the junkie spun like he’d been punched. He dropped to the ground. Most of his head was gone above his jaw.
She pushed the woman back against the van. The other woman tried to push back and failed. ‘What’s going on?’
Holly looked her in the eyes. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Angie. Angie Smi—’
‘Angie, you need to stop talking so loud and you really need to not scream again. Got it?’
‘I just want to—’
She slapped her hand over Angie’s mouth. ‘Not so loud. The first rule of fight club is no loud noise. If you have to talk, whisper. Got it?’
Angie nodded.
Holly took her hand away.
The other woman looked out at the headless junkie. When she spoke her voice was little more than a breath. ‘How’d you do that? I didn’t even see you draw your gun.’
‘Somebody else shot him.’ Holly pointed at the puddle of blood and gore just left of the junkie’s body. ‘I’d say someone pretty high up with a rifle.’
Angie looked at the body. ‘But they killed the junkie. They’re on our side, right?’
‘Maybe,’ said Holly. ‘Maybe it’s just some outsider who got bored and decided to shoot anything that moves.’
Angie’s eyes went wide. ‘You think they might shoot us?’
Holly shrugged. ‘Head that way. Keep quiet.
Stick close to the wall. Make sense?’
Angie nodded again.
‘Do you have any gear or supplies?’
‘No, nothing.’
Holly sighed. ‘Okay, then. Let’s go.’
They moved around the van and down the sidewalk. Holly let Angie go in front of her. The woman was too loud and too fast. If she was going to attract attention, Holly wanted her in front. Plus it was dangerous to let a stranger get behind you. There were too many crazy people wandering around.
Angie kept glancing back. Holly directed her with a nod or a quick gesture with the bat. They went ten blocks until she signaled they should stop.
‘Which way are we going?’ asked Angie.
‘We?’ Holly shook her head. ‘I’m headed north. I don’t know where you’re going.’
‘Can’t I come with you?’
Holly closed her eyes and shook her head again. Her fingers squeezed the bat’s handle. ‘Things ended messy with the last person I traveled with. And the person before that.’
‘I’ll be better.’ She put on a smile that wasn’t sure if it was ingratiating or sexy. ‘Two girls out conquering the world.’
‘We’ll see.’ Holly shrugged the backpack strap higher onto her shoulder. ‘How do I know you’re not just some outsider trying to grab my stuff?’
Angie laughed out loud, but slapped her hands over her mouth. ‘You think I’m an outsider?’
‘Not a very good one, but maybe. Why else would you be out?’
Her half-and-half smile faded. ‘I got thrown out of my sanctuary.’
‘Why?’
Angie gave a lopsided shrug, dipping her head toward one shoulder. ‘I like sex,’ she said.
Holly said nothing, but tightened her grip on the bat a little.
‘Not like that,’ said Angie. ‘I just like it. I have since high school. I’m not first-stage crazy or anything.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘If it’s the virus, I caught it twelve years ago in the back of Joey Frost’s pickup.’ She smiled. ‘That’s supposed to be a joke.’