by James, Guy
He looked at Brother Mardu and couldn’t keep a curtain of contempt from drawing shut across his face. How was that man so calm? The words ‘cool as a kid out of school’ came to Brother Acrisius’s mind, ‘cool as Tom the fool.’
It was some stupid fucking children’s rhyme from his elementary school days that he couldn’t quite place and kept misremembering and here it was chiming in without knocking. There were more words, that was for sure, but he didn’t know them.
If there were a device for lopping out phrases and memories from his brain, he would’ve given a morsel of child jerky for it. That was how much he wanted to erase these annoying, idiotic, ding-dongs from his past.
“Time to get going,” Brother Mardu said. His voice was casual and easy. He might’ve been getting up from a beach in the Caymans and announcing that it was time to go in for tea, as he’d gotten the just right dollop of sun for the late morning, and thank you ever so kindly for asking.
Staring at Mardu, Acrisius made no reply but his mind was screaming.
How are we to get going? How?
They were trapped in the town, now, discovered too early, and the explosives hadn’t been set off yet.
Fear and rage were making Acrisius’s insides boil.
What makes you so fucking sure that Saul and Beth made it into position? Why are you so damned confident all of a sudden?
As if in reply to his barrage of thoughts, Mardu said, “Just give it a few minutes. We worked all of this out, remember?”
Acrisius shook his head. He wanted to vomit.
It was true, they’d worked it all out, and Saul and Beth had gotten into their places, even though there was no way that Acrisius could know that. The Order had a small collection of two-way radios and their working battery innards, but they hadn’t wanted to risk tipping the townspeople off to any unsavory arrangements, so they’d gone in without the radios, and begun the kidnappings blind, on the assumption that everything was going as planned outside the fence as well as in.
In fact, at this very moment, Saul was hearing some of the commotion and looking through his binoculars. From his tree perch, he could see some of the market, and there was probably enough going on there to confirm the disturbance was worthy of hitting the little red button that would make things go kaboom.
There was no way to be completely sure because they weren’t using walkie-talkies—Acrisius said it was so that they could keep a low profile, and that had made Saul think of grading, and low profiles were good, but not too low, for a whole host of reasons. Be that as it was, at the moment all signs—most notably the fact that Brother Mardu and Brother Acrisius had been inside long enough to get their side of it done—were pointed to: red button.
“Come on,” Mardu said, “let’s get moving.” He gestured to the front of the truck and started off. Reluctantly, Acrisius followed, his dragging movements made even more leaden by fear.
As the two of them were climbing into the bulletproof glass-adorned and steel-reinforced cab of the truck, which couldn’t—they were pretty sure—be opened or gotten into from the outside, Saul’s massive thumb covered the red button of the detonator’s remote control and pressed.
At first, nothing happened, and Saul pressed the button a few more times—really squeezing it into its hole, but not too hard, because he was afraid of breaking the toy-like gizmo—and was about to whip out the other spare remote or even begin to check that the batteries were in right—he’d brought spares of those too—but there was no need. His persistent prodding had cajoled the thing into life, and it was now communicating with the little electronic things attached to the explosives at the fence, saying, ‘Hey. How are you? Yeah? Me too. Okay, great, let’s get to blowing the fuck up, shall we?’ In a split second, they would.
26
The cloudy fingers of the skyborne conflagration reached downward, threatening to leave the confines of their sphere. It was a lurid display, but of what? Anger? Contempt? Surrender? And who was the show for, anyway?
Larry Knapp certainly didn’t believe it was for him, though he sometimes played with the idea that it might be, that everyone around him was just a robot made for his own amusement—or torment, he wasn’t sure—and he was the only thinking and feeling being in the world. But no, that was just some too-dark beer and its congeners talking.
Unfortunately, what was now happening wasn’t the lovechild of his brain and some toxic congener of his post-apocalyptic brewing operation. This was fucking real.
Using a shirt sleeve, he wiped some of the bug parts mixed with Twinkie filling from his chin. Then he stepped backward until he was out of the crowd, distancing himself from the growing panic. He only tripped twice as he went, staying upright both times, which was quite the feat because he was trashed.
Impressively sloshed was the right term for his current state of being. He’d cippled the task, or tippled the cask, or something, and quite righteously if he did say so himself.
Wait, it was a jug, not a cask. A jug! That was the trick of it. That was the trick of it all. Screwing his lips up and over to one side, Knapp began to think on this real hard, hard enough that he furrowed his brow up to its limit, like he was trying to push all the skin off his forehead and show the market his hard skull, the bone glistening with booze.
But the jug draining was earlier, and he wasn’t feeling so great at the moment, not at all. But he was drunk, no, not just drunk, but damned drunk, and he was glad of that, because this was certainly not a time to be sober.
Knapp looked up at the sky and clapped a hand to his mouth. Beginning to stagger backward, he tripped again, and this time he did fall. He landed with the grace of a drunk, unhurt and unsurprised that the ground had lurched toward him as it had.
“This is it,” he whispered through his fingers, overcome by a mixture of dread and awe that was mixed more evenly than the bug parts and Twinkie filling on his sleeve, which was now getting on the front of his shirt because of the way he was holding his hand to his mouth. But that was okay, because the shirt hadn’t been washed in weeks. It hardly showed it, as it was a plaid with only dark colors, and that was okay, too…no, it was better than okay.
“Hell is boiling over. It’s the ’pocalypse, plocalypse, aploc ’o piss. That’s the one. The real one. Piss plocking all around. Fires in the sky. Hell.” He coughed, choking on some of his souring saliva. “And where the fuck is Jake…Jay…Jacko? Fucking ploc’o piss.” He looked around. “Jack?”
He put his hand down, leaning on the ground, and the movement teased out a grasshopper leg from the filling coating the front of his shirt. The leg that now stood upright like, well, if Knapp actually saw it, which he didn’t, he would say the Twinkie filling had an erection, a grasshopper-leg one, bent, but maybe usable for the mating of Twinkie filling—he wasn’t an expert when it came to such things. And, had he seen it, he would’ve shot it a toothsome grin and said, “Good for you grasshopperus. Good for you.”
But he didn’t see the Twinkie filling grasshopper leg erection because his eyes were directed skyward, at what he was convinced was the boiling over of hell. Hot fumes of evil had run up the sides of the sphere and condensed at the roof of the world.
Now it was beginning to drip downward, like it was a fucking distillery, and he was in exactly the wrong place. He was gaping at this with his mouth wide open, and an impressive dribble of saliva passed over his lips, ran down his chin, and began to grow like a precocious stalactite on his beard stubble.
Summoning his rapidly-sobering eyes to action, he followed a trail of cloud down to the lowest point he could see. There was a closing gap between the tendril of cloud and the perimeter at the outer gate. He watched the cloud float closer to the topmost part of the perimeter fence within his field of vision. Then Knapp leaned backward, adjusting his perspective so that the gap between cloud and fence became smaller and smaller until...
Contact.
“Fuck-all,” he whispered. “Fuck-all be damned and fucked twice over
.”
He thought for a second that he’d done that—that he’d made the clouds move like that, and a stupid grin began to creep onto his face, and it had only time to tease up the corners of his lips but not to draw them back from his teeth, when two explosions obliterated the day.
27
The blasts came one right after the other, and the ground under Knapp shook as a narrow swath of the perimeter fence next to the outer gate lit up. The flames danced a wild jig, as if they knew they’d be obscured in a split second and had to do their thing now—their one shot at the bigtime—and then that part of the fence was engulfed in smoke.
Knapp, drunk as he was, hadn’t made a move to protect his head or vital organs. He hadn’t made any move at all, except that the stalactite of spit that had been growing out of the point of his chin fell off and landed in the Twinkie sauce on his shirt, missing the sticking grasshopper leg by a narrow margin.
He stood up like the wobbly tosspot he was and for the first time in a while, the world seemed to be tottering more than he was. With a bug-eyed stare, he tried to survey the market and the burning fence beyond it.
The problem with that was his vision wasn’t right; there were bubbles of beer in it. They were shimmering and popping and then forming again somewhere else. Just like that: out of thin air there was beer. Miraculous.
He blinked, and that cast the bubbles into the depths of wherever such bubbles lived, and when he reopened his eyes they popped up again, inflating slightly.
It was incredible. It was wonderful even, but he hadn’t the time to enjoy it now.
“I can’t grab a cold one with you,” he said apologetically, “not right now…but…maybe later.”
He tried to blink himself sober, but that didn’t work, because it couldn’t work and never did, so he narrowed his eyes and craned his neck forward, moving his head in time with the drunken bobbing of the world around him, in an effort to compensate.
The world was a barfly too, as it turned out. Straining his eyes at the undulating pizza sliver of New Crozet that he was able to make out it in front of him, he didn’t like what he was seeing. No, not one bit.
Several of the townspeople, most of them older, had fallen, landing on their hands and knees, then falling flat or rolling over and putting their hands to their ears. His own ears were ringing, but he didn’t mind that.
Sometimes the brew did that to him, or maybe it was just the evenings, because it happened in the evenings, and most anything that happened to him could be attributed to alcamahol, because he was always throwing back that poison and barflying to his heart’s utter content, within the limits of what he could produce, of course, and when he was even remotely coherent—a rare event, he was either being a pain at the town meetings or hard at work expanding his operation.
“Grain,” he mumbled, remembering that was the reason he’d come out here in the first place. He needed more grain, and he had some old tools in his shed that he could trade, not that they’d be worth much, but you never knew what the traders might want, odd bunch as they were.
“Grain.”
He bowed slightly, put his hands on his knees, and squinted at the fires burning in the perimeter. It felt like the ground was rocking beneath him, like a rolling wave that would carry him to the fence where…
“Oh shit. Shit.” The fence, he realized, they are gonna get in.
“No.” It was a drunkard’s whine, as if he were asking for more drink, and in fact, he was. He did want more—time travel juice was exactly the order of the moment, because if New Crozet was exposed, the fucking zombies would get in, and that was a time to escape from. This was a time to run away from. If they did get in, he realized, there’d never be any more drink again.
And no more spirits to visit with, either. No more flying shadows of regret. All of that, all of this town, the zombies would spirit away.
“Spirit of the grain,” spilled out of his mouth, except it came out, ‘spit of ’a cay.’
He repeated it, and focusing on the word ‘spirit’ made some old thing in his head that had been put away and gathering dust for years click on and then he was moving into the crowd and toward the fires in the broken fence.
He was going to put a stop to this, and damn right no zombies were getting in on his watch.
It wasn’t much of a watch, because he couldn’t quite see straight right now, and he wouldn’t have been able to pour himself a drink without missing his cup, but he pushed himself toward the commotion all the same, having no idea what he’d do when he was in position to do it, and not knowing where said position was, either.
As Larry Knapp stumbled on, urged forward by a delirious and sudden inspiration, the town center, illuminated by the sky’s firelight, was overcome by chaos.
28
Pain exploded in Chad Stucky’s knee like a feeble wind chime caught in a sudden gale. And that was still before he’d reached her. He was no stranger to that pain, although it was usually far less sharp and not as sudden when it came, on account of the exertion that typically dredged it up was lighter than what he was currently doing.
Paying it heed in the amount of just slightly above zilch, he kept going until he was kneeling by her side. Her eyes—his woman’s beautiful green eyes—were wide and staring up in his direction, but not really looking at him.
She tried to say something, but blood bubbled from her mouth instead of words. The little spheres popped and let loose red trickles, which then ran down the left side of her face and spread into her silver hair.
She was prematurely gray, and Chad had always thought the color suited her, especially frame as it did the green luster of her eyes, without the streaks of blood in it, that is. Turning to look directly up at him, her gaze connected with his own.
There was a final message she needed to communicate, and the great strain of staying in the world a few moments longer to do it would be overcome. She was stronger than this. They’d made it so long together, and a few more seconds she could do—had to.
She didn’t need to say anything, though, because Chad understood perfectly well. It was all there: in her eyes, in the tiny, almost-floating spheres of blood spilling over her lips that should have been streaming words instead of a red-coated, dying breath, in the feeble attempts of her fingers to reach up and touch him that made her hands look like they were pinned to the ground as if her palms were staked.
Helping her, he took her left hand with his own and squeezed.
Kneeling lower, he kissed her forehead and stroked her hair, in which the blood was spreading.
There was blood on his fingers now, her blood, and he was massaging it deeper into the silver, and he could see that, but that was okay, because it didn’t matter right now.
The only thing he could do, the only thing there was left to do, was stay here, be with her. So he would do that. He’d do that no matter what, even if the town came crumbling down around him, until the zombies—and it would take more than one—tore him away.
She tried to raise her head, but he didn’t let her, keeping her head in place with his hand in her hair, gently, but also firmly. He wouldn’t let her eyes go where they wanted to. He wouldn’t let them see what they wanted to see. To see, that.
He could hardly look at it himself, although he’d already acknowledged it was there. It was the exclamation mark at the end of the sentence that was her life—had been her life.
“Look at me,” Chad said. His voice was wavering, and it felt like if the words were allowed to keep on shaking, they’d pull him into an inescapable madness, a padded room with no door, no windows, no lights, only a solitary air duct, one that didn’t drip or rattle or make any other noise that would allow him even a moment of distraction.
Because what she was trying to see he’d already seen: the fragment of concrete from the fence that had knocked her down, and which now was looking up at him out of her, occupying internal space that was supposed to be reserved for organs.
And Laura obeyed
and stopped struggling to raise her head.
She gave her husband of the post-apocalypse a beseeching look.
The red bubbles that weren’t words were coming more slowly now. He watched them come out and pool at the corners of her lips, gather and pool and wait.
A gurgle rose up from her throat, her eyes took on a look of mild bewilderment, and then they seemed to be looking somewhere else, not only past him, but past everything.
Chad Stucky went on stroking her hair and kissing her forehead for a long time.
With its fence broken and parts of it embedded in her, in his beloved wife, New Crozet seemed to have vanished. It had been there one moment, and now it was gone and he was in the forest, surrounded only by trees and the zombies lurking just over the next hill, or just past the next cluster of oaks. It was as if being exposed to the outside had popped a bubble that had always been transparent, but which had shown itself more fragile than anyone had realized until now.
And she was his beloved, had been his life, and now, he realized, he’d loved this woman more than he’d ever loved anyone else before, in spite of what he’d thought. It had taken this ending to make him see that, and isn’t that how those things always went?
She was gone, and so was New Crozet, off with her in that place where her green-eyed wisdom could still shine.
He began to shake his head, as if saying no, no, no.
But it was yes, yes, yes.
Yes.
The bubble was popped, and he could sense no trace of its filmy residue on him or around him, couldn’t see it, couldn’t smell it, couldn’t believe in it anymore. There was nothing of it left in the entire world.
Behind his now resting wife, twin columns of smoke were rising upward from the fence, thick and determined until they got a little too high. There the wind began to pull them apart, tugging them first one way and then the other, like some wind monster were sucking in the smoke, delighting in the fine New Crozet cigar, or perhaps the Order of the Dead’s smoke ’em war pipe, and then puffing it out across the rim of the sky.