The Felix Chronicles: Five Days in January

by R. T. Lowe

A table of six older women—he didn’t know how old, older than the girls at his high school and younger than his parents—had laid down their spoons in a defeated gesture of no mas, unable to finish their shared dessert. Monty’s signature dish, a mountain of chocolate covered vanilla ice cream balls ‘garnished’ with brownie crumbles, whip cream and chocolate sauce and served over an underplate of dry ice so the whole thing resembled mounds of steaming moose shit, had made ‘Mooseshit Monty’ (a nickname he reportedly loved, though Carter didn’t know anyone brave enough to say it to his face) one of the richest men in Buren, a little border town in northeastern Maine. Carter asked politely if he could clear their plates and a woman in bright pink lipstick made a purring sound and stared at him with drunk, lusty eyes as she drained the last of her salt rimmed margarita glass. He carried their dishes and the bowl of melting moose shit back to the kitchen, the eyes of the women on his ass (one of them, he was pretty certain, was Mrs. Tenney, his fourth grade teacher), wishing Monty didn’t make his younger employees wear such tight pants. Tips were great, if that’s what it took to loosen the purse strings of the wannabe MILFs, but his jeans chafed his thighs, and he’d read online somewhere crotch hugging pants could make you sterile, which didn’t overly concern him at the moment, not really understanding why anyone would ever want a baby.

  Carter cleared off his tray in one of the big aluminum washing tubs and let the faucet run until the water was icy cold, filling a large Styrofoam cup. Gulping down half, he noticed the kid on dish duty was watching the Numbered Ones video on his phone. Carter had been checking it out all day and thought it was mesmerizing. The brutality. The weirdness. The fact it was real. The thing was fricken’ mind blowing. So Carter and the kid whose name he didn’t know watched it. Twice.

  “That is so badass,” the dishwasher kid said in an awed voice, and giggled, blasting off the onion ring grease with a high pressure sprayer. “Let’s watch it again.”

  Carter nodded and glanced at everyone standing around staring at their phones. If Monty popped in for an unannounced inspection, he’d threaten to fire them all—phones were supposed to be left in the lockers, but some things were beyond even Monty’s control. Carter, like everyone else, couldn’t get enough of the video. The monsters had shredded the brothers, which was ridiculously gross, and scary, but the way Carter figured, Oregon was all the way on the other side of the country (he’d checked a map to confirm it was actually on the west coast), so it didn’t seem like anyone in Buren had much to worry about. The dishwasher kid was giggling again. “I think that’s his arm,” he was saying, stabbing a finger at the screen. “See? That’s the bone. Whoa! Gone! Those things are fast!”

  Carter’s cup was snatched from his hand.

  “Thought I’d find you in here circle jerking to your Internet pornography!” the old woman cackled. Her smile seemed to stretch for miles, her mouth yellow, her breath a repulsive cloud of tobacco and tooth decay. “I’ve got four tables out there that need clearing and one of them’s Mr. Monty’s. I apologized to him and told him I had no idea where Carter-the-busboy could’ve run off to, but I suspected you were outside on a break.” She laughed, hard and wheezy.

  Carter wanted to strangle her. ‘Grandma Stone Cold Bitch’ (‘SCB’ for short) was a sixties-something waitress who thought her twenty-year tenure of taking dinner orders meant she shared ownership with Monty.

  “Why’d you do that?” Carter asked plaintively, thinking if he could get away with it, he’d punch her right in her ugly old face. “You could’ve just got me.”

  “You ain’t my responsibility,” she chortled in her smoker’s rasp, her eyes lowering to the phone. “Those monsters are a sign, I’ve been sayin’ to anyone who’ll listen. The end’s here. Our Lord and savior will be sittin’ astride a fire breathing dragon, settin’ the clouds afire and the oceans to blood. You all better be repentin’ or your souls will be floatin’ in a lake of hellfire.”

  Carter stared back at her for a moment, wondering what the hell she was talking about. “Well if it’s all coming to an end, you can stop stealing my money.” It was widely known that SCB pocketed cash tips instead of adding them to the community tip jar to be settled up at the end of the night.

  “Stealing?” she replied, affecting an expression of abject horror, then laughed gleefully. “Sweetie, what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine.” She wiped the sweat beading under her nose. “It’s hotter than Satan’s ball sack in here. My damn swamp ass is soakin’ right through my pantyhose.” She sniffed the cup and said, smiling, “You didn’t poison this did you?” She took three long swallows and tossed the cup in the sink. “Throw that away, will you hot pants? Then get your tight little teenage buns back out—” Her hands flew to her throat, eyes bulging, and stumbled toward Carter.

  He backed away, holding out his arms, unsure of what she was doing, his only concern keeping the crazy old woman away from him. Pink bubbles formed on her lips, building and breaking, slicks of saliva streaming down her chin. Her leathery fingers tore at the loose skin on her neck and her face darkened, turning purple. Why is she choking herself? Carter wondered dimly, then the old woman was falling and he jumped aside, her face striking the floor with a resonating crack. He stared at her for a moment, too shocked to do anything, then finally bent over to check her pulse—isn’t that what they did on TV?—and a scream erupted. He stood just in time to see Stephen—the assistant manager who spent most nights drunkenly manning the fried food station—collapse on his stomach, the onion rings and fries frothing over greasily in their trays, spitting out oil like sparks from a campfire. Then Jackie, the waitress from New Hampshire who’d just started last week, went down with a loaded tray, pint glasses of soda and beer smashing on the floor. Carter made a move to help her and something crashed behind him. He spun around to see the dishwasher kid on his back, blood streaming from his nose, a Styrofoam cup rolling harmlessly into a cabinet. Half the kitchen staff was on the floor, unmoving, the other half screaming and pointing, staring stupidly.

  “Call 911!” Carter yelled, though no one seemed to hear or pay him any attention. He stared at the people still on their feet—there were six—and a few caught his eye, the rest looked stunned, transfixed by their dead co-workers. And there was no mistaking they were dead. What was going on? He hadn’t seen anything happen to them. One second they were fine and the next they weren’t breathing. Just like that. Like someone had pushed a button and ended their lives. He heard panicked screams from the dining room and one of the waiters flung open the back door and disappeared.

  “They’re gassing us!” a girl shrieked. It was Maria, a line cook. She bolted for the open door and fled into the night.

  Gas? Carter thought doubtfully, glancing up at the vents. Why would anyone want to gas a fast food joint in rural Maine? He sniffed the air. Nothing. The screams in the other room grew louder. The rest of the staff followed after Maria, leaving Carter alone with the bodies on the floor. He sidestepped Jackie and his gaze fell on her cold dead eyes, thinking it strange he could see her but she couldn’t see him. He slipped on a puddle of liquid and his knee came down on her stomach. He jumped up and muttered, “Sorry.” She was dead—as dead as dead could be—but no one really knew what happened when you die, so if her spirit was floating around he didn’t want her to think he was doing weird things to her corpse. He hoped she understood. In case she didn’t, he apologized again, and performed the sign of the cross though he had no clue about the proper order.

  Outside in back of the restaurant, it was quiet and dark beyond the range of the security lights. He supposed everyone had run off to their cars and driven off in a panic, probably crashing into the nearest telephone pole. He should get out of here, he thought, staring around, feeling oddly calm. There was nothing he could do. He couldn’t help anybody. He didn’t even know CPR. But he wasn’t so sure he wanted to leave. So much about Buren was boring, and this was anything but boring. He turned and looked back at the swinging door that led
to the dining room. He waited there, listening to the screams, the cries, the sounds of things breaking. Something awful was going on behind that door. People were dying. He was sure of it. So much death and suffering just a few feet away. Should he go? Take a quick look? The door called to him, daring him to grow a pair and cross the threshold—to experience the other side.

  He had to see it.

  Carter pushed the door open and made his way through the dining room, his head swiveling. When he’d last cleared a table, everyone in the restaurant was in their seats, eating and laughing, drinking cocktails, beer and soda (and tap water, of course, which came complimentary for every diner). Now almost no one was at the tables. Most were on the floor—twenty? fifty? more?—foaming at the mouth, their faces blue, eyes glassed over. The rest were running around, screaming, begging for help, but the chaos in the room drowned out their cries, making everything sound the same, unintelligible. Beside him, a woman with tear soaked eyes knelt down next to a small girl and pounded on her chest, imploring her to breathe. The girl was dead. She wouldn’t be breathing again anytime soon. Couldn’t the woman see that? What was wrong with her?

  Carter waded through the carnage, trying to make sense of the voices, the panicked shouts, the screams of terror. Between the hostess stand and the door, a man on the floor stared up at the ceiling with unseeing eyes, his cowboy hat beside him. Carter stepped over Monty and whispered, “Rest in peace Mooseshit.” Hey, he thought, he might be watching. You never know. He emerged from the restaurant, standing numbly on the snowplowed sidewalk, shivering from the cold, sirens wailing mournfully in the distance. He looked out over the packed snowdrifts to the other side of the lamplit street. A man came scrambling out of Jack & Jill’s Diner and cracked his face on a parking meter, his hands digging wildly at his throat before vanishing behind a snowbank. Carter heard screams from down the way and saw a young couple running from a building, yelling for help. Something very big was going on, Carter realized. Something much bigger than Monty’s restaurant, even bigger than the town of Buren. Carter felt different, like his eyes had been opened to a whole new world, a world he wanted to explore.

  The snow started to fall, great big flakes, the kind that look pretty in pictures but can bury your car overnight. He started for the parking lot behind the building, his thoughts turning to the old woman drinking from his cup. He stopped in his tracks and the keys to his Explorer fell from his hand onto the snow dusted pavement. I shouldn’t be alive, he thought. I should be dead. It was the water. It had to be the water. He brought his hands to his face, his warm face, his breath misting the air in steaming clouds. He was alive. Very alive. More alive than he’d ever felt in his life.

  Chapter 15

  Releasing Steam

  The ping pong ball sailed gracefully through the air and landed in the plastic cup, splashing amber liquid onto the table. Across from Felix and Lucas, Salty and Larry—two of the three fatassosaurs, both offensive lineman on the football team—exchanged a fist pump as Felix removed the ball and gulped down the room temperature beer.

  “Dude’s on fire,” Lucas complained to Felix, shaking his head. “Thank God Larry’s on his team”—on cue, Larry released the ball, overshooting the table by five feet—“or we’d be shitfaced. Actually”—Lucas gave him a questioning look—“why aren’t you shitfaced? You’ve had like eighty of those.” He nodded down at the rack configured like bowling pins then tossed the ball, burying it in a cup in the second row. Larry groaned and chugged the beer.

  Lucas was right, Felix realized. He’d been drinking everything in sight since they’d arrived at Astoria Hall, and that was over three hours ago. Maybe, he thought dismally, alcohol didn’t affect him anymore. If there was ever a day when he needed some drinks to smooth over the spiny ridges of his anxiety, it was today. Two more people had just been added to his body count, and though they deserved to die just as much as the Faceman, the Protectors and Riley (maybe more), it seemed he couldn’t get through a week without killing someone. He flicked his wrist and the little ball plopped down in a half-filled cup. Salty’s turn to drink, which he did with gusto, then he released a floor shaking belch which elicited laughter from Brant Fisher and some other guys on the football team waiting to play the winners.

  “Weird fucking week,” Lucas muttered dryly. “Tanner’s caught in a mall shooting yesterday and then our school today.”

  “Could’ve been worse,” Felix replied.

  “No kidding,” Lucas agreed. “The guy’s Facebook page was a horror show. They’re saying he and his buddy were planning to kill everyone at the ERA rally because they’re in favor of gun control. It was a damn good thing they showed up after the protest was already over and everyone else was in class or watching that news report. Then the guy’s gun wasn’t working so by the time they were ready to start murdering kids the cops had showed up and they killed themselves before the cops could take them down.”

  Felix nodded. That was the official story, but only he and Allison knew it was only partly true.

  “So my mom’s trying to decide,” Lucas continued, watching a ball rim off a cup, “if I’m better off here or at home. I forwarded her the email from the dean’s office so she knows I can stay enrolled and do all my classes online.”

  “She wants you home, right?” Felix guessed.

  “The monsters were the deciding factor for her.” Lucas laughed. “Psychos with guns are everywhere, but those two brothers were eaten in Ashfield Forest, and of course my mom reminded me it’s nowhere near Minnesota and just on the other side of town for us.” He picked up a cup and drained it, even though both Larry and Salty had missed their shots. “That’s how bad you guys are!” Lucas shouted at them and they burst out laughing, along with a trio of girls watching Lucas’s every move, taking the occasional selfie with Lucas in the background playing beer pong. “I told her we’re as safe here as anywhere,” he said to Felix.

  Felix grunted in agreement. Within hours of the shooting, President Taylor, Dr. Borakslovic, and PC’s board of trustees had contemplated temporarily closing the school. The proposal was rejected. No one had any idea of how to respond to the threat of what everyone now believed were government created genetically engineered flesh-eating monsters, which was clearly an issue that went far beyond Portland College and the safety of its students. As for the shooting, at the open door meeting, which included student representatives (among them, Caitlin, who’d reported back to everyone), President Taylor and the board had appeared to be in agreement on sending the students home until the completion of a thorough investigation and assurances the two shooters weren’t part of a larger organization planning to target the school again. Then Dr. Borakslovic, the dean of students, and Felix’s least favorite administrator, had stunned everyone in attendance by announcing she was a member of the ERA, and because of her affiliations with both the political movement and the school, her unique perspective on the wider implications of the shooting warranted consideration. If they closed the campus, she’d stated with an eloquence and forcefulness Felix wouldn’t have thought her capable of (since her demeanor when she’d delivered the address at freshman orientation had been cold and condescending), PC’s leadership would be granting the shooters, and those like them, exactly what they sought—the shooters, in effect, would have won. Portland College, and the beliefs and principles that the PC community stood for, Dr. Borakslovic had argued, should not yield to the demands of murderers and terrorists. It should not yield to fear. After concluding her remarks, those in attendance gave her a standing ovation. When the clapping finally died down, the decision was made to keep the school open but to allow those who wanted to return home to do so with the ability to continue their classes online. As for those who stayed—which had turned out to be just about everyone from what Felix could tell—the school had graciously accepted the offer of assistance from off duty and retired police officers who were now patrolling the paths, volunteering their time until things settled down.

/>   The students reacted to the news of the Numbered Ones and the attempted campus massacre by holding parties in every dorm and frat on campus, determined to drink and dance away their fears. The administration gave their tacit approval and the RDs and RAs were turning a blind eye to all the normal rules about drinking from cans and bottles and partying in the hallways. Astoria’s RD—a kid named Santiago who had the coolest beard Felix had ever seen on a twenty-year-old—was passed out on a couch next to Jonas and the two were sleeping comfortably, the fatassosaur’s massive tattooed bicep propped lazily around his neck.

  “Let’s call it a tie!” Larry yelled across the table. “I can’t feel my fingers anymore.”

  “Works for us,” Lucas yelled back and handed Felix a cup as the kids on the football team took over the table. “So they’re renewing Summer Slumming. One more season then they’ll decide what to do from there. I need to be in Florida second week of June for filming.”

  “No shit!” Felix exclaimed, then he recalled Florida was 3,000 miles away and they hadn’t had the talk yet. Would Lucas still want to go, Felix wondered, when he found out Lofton Ashfield had Lucas’s name on a list that sentenced him to death unless he could demonstrate he possessed supernatural abilities?

  “Yeah, one of my agent’s people called this morning. I was gonna tell you guys at dinner.” He smiled sheepishly. “Then monsters ate some dudes and a couple of guys tried to kill everyone on campus. Seemed like a bad time to share the good news.” He frowned and let out a sigh. “It’s a crazy fucking world.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, even crazier than Lucas realized. He glanced toward the windows and thought about what it all meant, wishing his brain wasn’t functioning with such clarity. In the corner behind a lounge chair he saw Jimmy Clay, the kid who’d assaulted him in a bathroom stall after the Milford game, glowering at him, arms crossed, staring him down. Felix had no idea what he’d done to piss him off so much (besides being unable to score a touchdown in their last game which would have given the Sturgeons a chance to play for the Rain Cup where pro scouts may have watched Jimmy play). Felix stared back, musing about how unfortunate it would be if the ceiling suddenly collapsed on his big block of a head. He looked away, banishing the idea from his mind, knowing he could make it a reality with a single focused thought.