Dismembership
For two days I wait for my strength to come back while she goes through the motions with blankets and food. She feeds me soup made of cabbage, carrots, onions, turnips and celery because they’re made of mostly water and cellulose; fibers that don’t digest. When I reach for more she refuses, saying, “I know how much to feed you.” She spoons me little dribbles of the chunky, watery stuff and says, “This is a negative calorie food. It’s so light your body burns more calories than it gains.”
What she means is this- food has to be processed. The jaw muscles work, the tongue pushes, saliva begins the breakdown of starches and this turns the food into a lump called the bolus, so it can be swallowed. The esophagus moves the bolus down to the stomach through a squeezing, squishing process of peristalsis. Then acid is produced and mixed with the food before passing it to the small and large intestines and more digestive juices, allowing the body to start absorbing the liquefied food. Finally, anything that isn’t absorbed is passed into the bladder and the colon to be eliminated. All of this requires energy.
“Metabolism is like a switch with an on position and an off position.”
What she doesn’t understand is that seventy percent of human metabolism takes place in the basal metabolic rate, which is technical for staying alive. Twenty-five percent is exercise, leaving only five percent to thermogenesis, or the absorption and storing of calories. For all that work, the energy burn-off is relatively low.
“We can get rid of that stomach if you leave it up to me.”
All the theories in the world fester in the absence of fact.
“Can you make out colors yet,” she asks, putting down the bowl to look through a magazine. Around us is a hangar filled with food. Clothes stacked to the ceiling. Rows of black-and-white family sizes wholesaled in plastic, sunflower seeds by the bucket and soaps by the dozens.
Like a clean pentagram we camp, surrounded by a circle of activated air fresheners. “You don’t want to know what the meat section smells like,” she says, “And I thought it was nasty at regular-sized places.”
“Is there a pharmacy here?”
“Of course.”
“Help me up.”
Past tomato sauce and chocolate powder, past the bakery dotted with gray-green breads, past tables of over-sized books and variety pack underwear, past rows guarded by the monoliths of this departed culture I find the pharmacy and tear through it. I know where to look and I know what I’m doing. I know milligrams and I want nothing else. Fuck everything but time-releases cheated on with splitting and crushing. Fuck the shriveled world like these displays of sitting fruit, this pathetic failed suicide stumbling and drooling with disappointed family.
I find what I need and swallow it. Then I swallow some more. I’m pushing and throwing through bottles with a woman’s screams in my ears when everything kicks in and the sounds twist away, lost in the insulation of the compounds. I welcome the monster into my heart. I let it tear as it wants to tear, burn and build and play in the black sand and shit of what this has become. I see only flashes, a scrapbook of what it wants me to see filled with photos of a new place built by broken things shove-assembled together, of fires lit and stamped, of arms coming up to defend.
This is right. Let the anger of the lost pour through me, the drowning of a billion destinies and plans, of legacies marching on and on into the brink of flame. Let me pay back the plans for babies and music and record keeping and record making. Let me put to rest the idea this was all going somewhere, let me sit at its grave and say everything’s square now. Let my fingers form revenge, and to hell with who I am.
Hours of this war pass. They feel like seconds. When I’m seeing live again I’m marathon breathing and covered in cuts and blood. I find Adena hiding behind the door of a plastic play set, covered in motor oil and ripped cloth with slices on her face. She pulls away from me, a look in her eyes as she screams for me to get away. I reassure and promise her but it does nothing. She’s seen me from violent angles, knows what I’m capable of, the ripping apart of this place under drugged fingers, and from the look of her she got in their way. She won’t listen anymore so I leave her there.
It’s obvious there’s no going back now so I find an axe and the door and open it, putting the barricade back behind me and walking out through the putrid crowd and into a wind storm, all the time hacking, hacking, hacking.
Folk Lure
I pass a library collapsing into itself, a thousand years of words naked to the sun and rain. A thousand years of broken hearts and huddled knowledge left to be chewed by the bacteria and oily mandibles. All of man’s progress left to decay to the bitter end.
In front of the town hall a burn-woman gets too close so I swing at her neck and take her to the asphalt. With the courts to my back, I finish the thing. When she’s in pieces I turn to the doors of town hall and see it swollen with victims, pulsing like an injury. “Stay,” I tell them but they don’t, the scab giving way, the stilted legs pouring forward and down the stairs. I have no weapons further than the axe and that takes time, so I get moving and get faster through the streets. I find a food market but there’s too many of them so I keep going, hungry, out, my back naked without a pack and supplies.
I come to a grand intersection and find it crawling. Victims everywhere, bumping and twisting. Their moves seem more desperate now; not at all like the slow gestures they’ve being dealing in. They’ve taken on the twitchy needs of beetles and flies; their food and light bulbs are my skin and meat. I even see one or two bending to the ground where the skin dust collects, scooping it with dull hands and shoveling it to their mouths, gnawing at the dry stuff to choke it down. Even this is flesh I suppose, and when supplies are low humans have always adapted.
But there are more now than before. I lose count at forty and this, this is just one place. What was something to keep one eye on has become something for two, this crowd not possible for navigating, the smell and sound of me getting to the air and a reaction setting in. Their hunger has reached danger level and for the first time I’m beginning to doubt if I can handle it out here.
Behind me, I learn, is every one of them that’s spotted me since I left. A blood storm is converging with me as its eye.
I find the closest auto, a utility van, and I run to it, check the door and find it locked. Looking in, seeing it empty, seeing the cage in the back for holding the tools and supplies, I know it’s okay to betray the safety of the window so I pull the axe back. I swing at it and contact, swing and contact while the wall of them tightens like a fist around me, only feet away and eager to have me while still lifeless in the eyes. Finally I get through the safety glass enough to pull it apart along with my hand skin, push my arm through the sting and grab and pull the lock up, pull myself up and through the hole, feeling hands on my ankles as I panic my way in. I close the door as fingers fall on it.
The van surrounded at all sides and its integrity broken, I know the cab isn’t safe. With no key it’s a wait until the excitement dies down. Then I can run out and away and evaluate what has to be done. For now I find the cage in the back has a hatch between the seats, the key to it in a storage slot on the dashboard, so I open it and go to the back with the axe.
The walls are a system for holding an electricians wires and clips and tools in place, leaving the middle of the floor open. I put the axe down and search through the tools with a soundtrack of hands and chests banging on the sides, but find nothing to survive with.
I think of Adena, hiding from me back at the store. The only other survivor and she thinks I’m a murderous beast. To her credit, at least she’s right.
The rhythm of hungry hands eventually settles into a calm one and I use it to fall asleep to. Even in my dreams, everyone is dead.
***
My alarm clock is the sound of skull-bursts and ricochets.
Out front, a victim is spread across the hood, his black and gray brain flung out onto the windshield as he slides off the van. T
hen, further away, another one walking until his head ruptures.
Sniper fire.
I push the cage open and look out, the view much quieter. All the windows in the buildings look empty, unbroken, nothing that would bring gunfire down. Then I look up to the roofs and see a man up there waving slow and purposeful and yelling something from the top of a hotel.
The space around the van is clear so I step out. Nearby are more of them, coming closer, pushing at each other to reach me first. The closest he fires at and kills, the kind of kill with quote marks.
He yells something down ten stories of open air but I can't make it out. I shout, "What?"
“Metal door, asshole,” he points.
I run to the base of the hotel and when I come close I see a thick door has been pieced together out of scrap and grafted to the frame. I go to it and push and it swings in, enough to squeeze through, heavy, and I pull and close it, find a deadbolt and slap it closed, checking twice to be sure.
The hotel lobby is made of oak and lacquer and over-sized vases bearing the large-leaves of artificial plants, the elegance blemished by a set of stairs taken apart and smashed up, the top half hanging useless and amputated. Somewhere that echoes, a voice says, “Take the gun.”
On the front desk is a handgun. I grab it, looking for the voice.
“Over here,” the elevator says, its door forced open and no car blocking the way into the dark. I peek in and look down, down to the basement level where a pile of victims sits like a snake pit, some of them moving with broken arms and legs, the rest of them not. “I’ll take care of those,” the back of my head shakes and I look up, seeing ten floors up to the top and the wide man there with a very long gun.
He says, “I don’t trust doors."
“Or stairs.”
“In the kitchen is a dumb-waiter.” He puts the sight to his eye, squinting the other. “Get in it.”
I turn to find the kitchen and he fires down, down through the dark spine of the building running eleven floors straight to the bottom, through the heads of victims lying broken underground, snuffing them out.
I find the kitchen filled with quiet, brushed-metal stoves and other dead machines, some that once steam-cleaned coffee and spit from glass and ceramic, others that bubbled wide pots of soup and sauce. Past pristine tables waiting for vegetables to chop, fish to dissect and red meat to hammer, I find a small door in the wall fitted with an unlocked combination lock. I pull the door open, the space inside no more than a television.
I think about it a second. Then get in. Immediately it kicks and whirs- the first electricity I’ve heard in a while, bringing me slowly up through the black. Only a few times light flicks at me through the spaces, otherwise I can't see. All the way I regret my decision knowing this may be the way I end.
I hit the top and hear a second combination lock being worked and pushed aside. Then the door pulls open and the man is looking in with blinding light behind his buzzed blonde hair.
I look at the lock in his hand. “You know these things are dumb animals?”
“So are rats,” he says, “but eventually even they get everywhere.”
Everyone Needs a System
“This is a Handgun Room,” he says with fat teeth. “Pistols, revolvers, so on.” Our footsteps fall quiet on dark red carpet. “Next is a Canned Goods Room, got your vegetables, peas and beans, your sauces, your soups. Then you have a Dry Foods Room. Rice, pasta, flour. Next a Semi-Automatic Room, oldies like M1 Garands all the way up to the Rugers and Soviet jobs. Then, you have a Panic Room.”
I turn to him, his thick forehead aimed up at me.
“It has a bug-out-bag filled with choice supplies from each room. Also a reinforced door with a deadbolt lock and an alternate exit. Every hallway of every floor has a Panic Room. Long story quick, the shit goes down, you go to a Panic Room.”
The hotel is hollow. It buzzes with power from the generators around us, only the necessary lights switched on to conserve power. Down the wide hotel hallway it’s one, big, beige washout broken by a rainbow. “That’s color coding above the doors,” he says. “I painted those squares for reference. Cold colors are food supplies- purple for canned, green for dry, blue for liquid. Hot colors are not food supplies. You’ll notice I don’t do a lot of fucking around. I don’t take chances and I don’t keep all my eggs in one basket.”
“Isn’t this hotel one, big basket?”
“I have others. The point is I don’t wait around to die. With all this spare time we have, all there is to do is prepare and move. I’m here to stay alive and if you’re not, go shit yourself.”
We continue down and turn left; more rooms and more color squares. Every room has a purpose, an idea. Some rooms have maps drawn on their walls, others are stockpiles of tools or water jugs or storage bags, the beds pushed aside or used, windows kept clear or set with a gun and appropriate ammo.
I double-take a room that for a second looks alive. It’s covered in bodies; head-to-toe, floor-to-ceiling porn cut-outs. Toes and mouth, tits and asshole. Not an inch missed.
“That’s a Jerk Room. You want one, you make your own,” his face unchanging.
“You’ve made these before. Other places.”
“Of course. You’ve seen one?” I nod. "Then you were in my house."
“You lived there before this?”
“No, but it’s mine now. Look I’m helping you to live for now but when this is all over, we have some territory to split up.”
I hold the gun up from the lobby, phrased like a question.
“A test.” He takes it from me, opening it to show it’s not loaded. “If you’d have pulled it on me you’d be dead.”
I smile. “A person could bring their own.”
“Of course, but given the chance?” He puts the gun under his beltline. “Hard to resist.”
I look around the Jerk Room and wonder how many of these porn-stars are walking the streets right now as hungry scabs, implants melted to their rib cages, dried saline running down their black bellies.
He says, “My name’s Daniel,” and looks around. “I favor ass-to-mouth myself.”
“John. Which color is for medical supplies?”
Dichlor (Cl)
For two days I help the cause, sorting and filing. Daniel tells me to stay behind and locks the door of my assigned room saying, “When you have the training I’ll take you with me,” leaving in black gear and duffel bags. My legs twitch and I count the walls and cameras between the sweat on my neck and the medical supply rooms, the alphabetized bottles inside filled to the top. His level of organization is hard to bypass, but it can be done.
On his way out I ask his helmet, “Have you thought to check the expirations on all your meds?”
“Of course.” He comes back a hundred minutes later with things from his list; rope and yeast in the bag he hands to me. The one he hides has lubricants and videotapes that I let him pretend I don’t see- a sex shop snatch-and-grab. I bring what he wants to the appropriate rooms, always working in his needling eye line, secretly making head maps.
The missions are routine, each time the click of a lock and my eyes sinking into dark wells as I recall footsteps through the carpet. Turn right out the door then eleven steps, left at the extinguisher and down fifteen more, pivot left at 305 and look up at the red square.
Then one day he says, “Let’s hit the pool.”
I follow him to the ground level and down the rope hanging through the chopped-up stairs and through doors I haven’t been. On the other side we come into damp air and a massive rectangle of a room; an in-ground pool cut fifteen feet wide, fifty feet long and nine feet deep into it’s middle, flicking with ripple-lights and smelling of cleansers.
“Are we swimming?”
“Shooting." Off to the side there's a table set up with handguns, ammo and sights. All the way at the other end are targets stapled to mats, the kind used on the floors of gyms.
“I know how to fire a gun.”
; “Not correctly,” he replies, walking to the table. “Your dad took you to the range when you turned eighteen, showed you how to hit bulls-eyes, right?” The dribble of water, pristine and choking with pH-levelers. “Good start but it won’t save you.”
I stand at the pool’s edge, looking through the water to the bottom. “Can I jump in or not?”
“It’s not for swimming. I maintain the clean water because as you’ve noticed plumbing doesn’t work anymore. That's our drinking water.”
I look from him to the pool.
“You’ll contaminate it. Chlorine kills most things but who knows what we’re coming in contact with out there,” motioning to the dead world.
I look at him, the pool again.
“I’ll shoot you in the face,” he adds.
I turn. “I was thirteen when he brought me to shoot. Out in the woods, where they don’t check I.D.”
“Then your father was a smart man. But this is the world of defensive shooting.”
“The difference?”
“Blood. Teeth. Heart attacks, the stuff that make it real and fast. The point here isn’t to fire a gun as accurately as possible, the point is how quickly you can fire it accurately.”
I come to the table and pick up the handgun, black and heavy and fitted with a metal-and-glass scope. I aim it at the center of Daniel's chest. “What if I use these skills to kill you?”
“You’re welcome to try. If you hold the gun that tightly though you won’t hit shit." My hand gives slack. “Your grip has to be just right; too tight and you influence your shot, too loose and you lose stability. Now face the target.”
A Chemical Fire Page 5