I had to find that life, both physically, meaning right this minute or it would get away from me, and mentally. I was finally realizing how grand of a mistake it was to run from Gene in the heat of my anger. It had to change. I headed south in the night. I think it was south.
~~~~
Chapter 19
The Road
I’d started my way back to find Gene in a positive, otherwise unburdened disposition. After a few hours of walking, however, the truth of everything happening jumped atop my body and soul with the strength of twenty elephants, all pregnant and with spikes in their hooves. I was doomed.
First, the hunger caught up to me. After eating the brain of Evans, I sort of unconsciously sworn off all food forever. The day and early part of the night in the barn delivered no signs of hunger, for my mind tricked itself into not feeling hungry. But now, a little after midnight, it was breaking me. I could feel my stomach beginning to eat at itself. The acid boiled inside, and I imagined thousands of tiny organisms of unnamed characteristics roasting other parts of my bodies on skewers around a fire made from more organs and flesh. The pain rose high enough for me to honestly think, if only briefly, that such a thing was happening.
Second, I’d not slept well in nearly two weeks. A lack of sleep garnered me the permanent sensation of always being slightly high, but not in a good way. Lethargy competed with energy due to urgency, and that furthered my advancement toward a full-on crash. The two should never dance and they were doing just that.
Finally, grief again made itself present, a slap in the face because grief knew the other two monsters had suddenly appeared at the same time. I grieved over everything again—my family, my life, Gene, Haydon, eating humans, and the crippling knowledge that no matter what I did I would likely have no future on this planet.
The three horsemen, as it were. They tore me down on the spot as yet another thunderstorm broke through the clouds to find the top of my head. I found myself next to a lonely group of trees on a creek bed and took perhaps the shoddiest refuge in the history of refuge. The rain covered me almost instantly as wind-blown thunder seemed to dive right into my gut, let alone my ears. Grief pushed me down to my knees with force. Slumber took me by the jaw and held me upright so it could slap me several times with brute force. And hunger attached hooks to my nipples, hanged me from a tree, threw heavy rocks at my bare balls, and stuck its fist deep up my ass.
I was literally seeing these things as I describe them. In my mind, I was being raped by hunger while grief and slumber beat me to a pulp. Grief was a tall, muscle-endowed leviathan with the head of Medusa and scaly, gray skin. Slumber appeared more like a morbidly obese mix between woman, walrus, and a glob of slime. Hunger was a man my size, my structure, but all in shadow with glowing blue eyes and one insanely oversized arm, the arm for the deed.
I screamed. I screamed like nothing before, like no screams before on earth. I hated the feeling. I thought it was happening, that I was a plaything for these three beasts. I couldn’t escape, no matter how hard I tried. It was over for Wallace Auker.
Another blur struck. I can’t remember anything until the next morning when all I could taste was mud—it tasted nice, in fact. The sound of chirping birds awoke me in the same small patch of forest along the creek. My face was buried in the mud before me. How I didn’t suffocate is beyond me.
Grief was gone, as was slumber. Hunger, however, held on with its claws of rusted iron. After urinating in the creek before taking a heaping gulp of water from the same exact area of my pee, I set off in the southern direction in hopes of finding either food or Gene or both. After all, his car contained an ample supply of the stuff I needed.
Walking about two miles brought me to a grim realization—I may not be alive much longer. Clearly, my body showed signs of deterioration, as I’d lost something like twenty pounds in a week, my skin was pale and dirty, and my bones, in particular the joints, seemed to have been replaced with those of a ninety-year-old woman. The weakness was there too, signaled by my struggle to walk two simple miles in what was turning out to be a relatively cool day in late August.
Falling to the ground and rolling on my back, I looked up at the sun as it neared its apex for the day. “Where have you been?” I asked it with no return. “You could be my guide.” I remember everything of my speech to the sun, and I honestly believed I spoke to a living thing. “Would you guide me somewhere? Back to Gene?”
“I can guide you,” it said. It sounded like an aged Mexican woman who smoked far too much. “To Gene, you say?”
“Gene is somewhere. I know he’s somewhere, Sun. Can you take me to him? I’m lost.”
“Gene is in a place. Gene is not right here.”
She was a goddamn disaster, the sun. She was beginning to frustrate me. “Please provide a direction for me to find my destination. Please!”
“You are Wallace.”
I rolled over onto my stomach and breathed in the wet grass. I could put up with the sun no longer. The grass was green and thick, like salad. I took a bite of a few strands, chewed it like cud, and swallowed. I’ve tasted worse. I did it again and then again, enough to provide my stomach the gentle ease it badly deserved. Before I knew it the sun had retreated, using my sudden unconsciousness to slink away literally into the night. That bitch.
I slept through the night right there on the dewy grass. When I woke in the morning I was covered in my own piss and shit, a sign that eating grass may not have been all that swell of an idea. I went into the creek and bathed it all off, crudely washing my ragged clothes in the process. The rest of the day was spent trying to dry myself and my clothes as I walked, no more hallucinations entering my vision, all while I remained very hungry.
Where were the animals? They were either missing from the area or extinct, but they just weren’t around. I wanted to see them, both to break my mind of monotony and possibly to catch one for food. A squirrel, prairie dog, deer, lion, anything. Did the demise of the human race progress the fall of all animals as well? Too illogical, but I couldn’t find any answer.
The answer came in a badly rusted car buried beneath some rubble next to the foundation of a burned house. At this point I was searching everything crossing my path, so of course I would look in the car. I searched deep down in the center consoles and then the glove box. Inside the glove box I found none other than three meat cans. They were the same kind Gene kept in his bag, the kind I scoffed at when he mentioned his rations before our trip began. Fitting and ironic, but I would not argue.
The meat was all wolfed down at a rabid pace, all but the last few sausages in the final can. These could come in handy down the road further if I found myself in the same hungry situation. I preserved them for my life until a later time.
The evening rolled around, no sign of anything nearby, no real knowledge of my direction. I found an old playground beside a river bend. To the top of the slide I went, my vista gorgeous and haunting. I watched the clouds from the western horizon darken as the sun again fell. Lightning became increasingly more vivid with each strike.
This was the kind of moment I gather was the entire meaning behind the Ire, the disease gripping all of humanity for twenty brutal years. I was truly, truly alone, not a person around for any purpose. The Ire kept us from interacting, and I was not fucking interacting. For the first time, I believe I was lonely. It hurt. I’d left a miracle to find freedom. Freedom, however, turned out to be a disguise for misery. I hated it. I wanted Gene back. I wanted to find Oklahoma and reunite him with his sister. I wanted to go back to my cabin and watch bad reruns and waffle on whether or not I wanted this guy calling me to be my friend. I wanted everything but this, because this was nothing. This was nothing with a sharp rusty blade.
The creature known as hunger left my side for a while, but grief now rumbled back with impenetrable force. Perhaps it was accompanied by its buddy melancholy. Regardless, I could feel myself losing ground on reality. What used to be now seemed figments of something no
t all too real. My past blurred and it scared me. I wanted more than anything to hold onto my sanity. Seeing the ground begin to boil like lava, the lightning producing glowing images of skeletons in the sky, a tree forming a face and widely opening its mouth, and a host of large two-headed bird creatures walking in my direction, I pretty much sat in my own despair over the fact that sanity was no more. Then I slept on the slide.
~~~~
Chapter 20
Motor Odor
I can’t honestly remember if I dreamed that night. I may have, but it was forgotten. There was certainly sleep, and I am unsure as to how I slept on that tiny slicky slide. I did somehow. But that didn’t matter now, because my world upon waking was starkly different.
Clearly, Gene had found me and brought me to his car. I arose from the backseat while the car remained fast in motion. I saw that indeed Gene was my captor, thankfully. I smiled.
“Thank you,” I said.
But he didn’t smile. He didn’t even bother to look in the mirror at me.
“Gene?”
Silence. I was receiving the silent treatment. No doubt that he was mad. He drove faster, in fact. And the car had a terrible smell inside, something beyond rancid.
“Say something to me, Gene. Please?”
Pure silence. I asked every few minutes as he continued to drive. While irritated by it, I was actually incredibly delighted to be back in his company, talking to another person without the Ire. Yes, it still was not there. It was fairly apparent it would not return between us.
My stomach seemed full, which was curious. I should be starved. Still, no answers, or even just a word, would emerge from Gene’s mouth. After four hours of driving we finally stopped to relieve ourselves by a once-used roadside park with trees and everything. Gene went to a berm behind the badly broken building and sat on his butt away from my direction. I sat beside him, hoping he would speak.
“Wallace,” he said after five numb minutes.
“Well there you are.”
“I should speak, you need to shut your mouth. Is that understood?”
I nodded hesitantly.
“For two days I searched for you, Wallace. I realized what I had done, kind of making you eat Evans with me. It wasn’t direct, but if not for me you would have never tried it. I didn’t see it before you left, but you left and it made me see it.”
For such a sincere speech, Gene could have formed a stronger vocabulary. He was typically stronger in words than that.
“I needed to apologize to you, but I feared I would never see you again. I don’t know this land. You don’t know this land. I was just lucky in finding you in that church.”
“Wait. Church?”
“I asked you not to talk, Wallace, and you agreed. Hold up on your part of the bargain. Things will get answered soon.”
“But Gene—”
“Shut up!”
I obeyed, slightly fearfully too.
“I had driven around so many roads in this area. I traced my routes on this map.”
Gene handed me the map to show pen tracks heavily re-traced in many of the roads around us. He was a determined man.
“I’d gone by the old rotten church a couple times already and I should have gone in when I saw it the day you left. Could have saved me a lot of grief.”
I wasn’t in there, Gene. No dice.
“I didn’t sleep well that first night. I just hoped you had returned when I woke up.” This was where the tears began. “You had not, Wallace. You were still gone. That other piece of me, it was ripped away. The one person I was able to be around in twenty years was gone as quick as he showed up. I wanted to drive that fucking car into a river, maybe a tree or a building. Anything to end it. But I kept looking instead. Kept looking. I lost hope with each minute.”
The poor guy was a walking waterfall of tears by now. My tears were also building.
“Then, last night, I would go around once more to look for you before taking for Oklahoma. That is when I noticed the shadows.”
“Shadows?” I wasn’t allowed to talk but I did anyway. “What?”
“In the church. I saw shadows through the broken window. The lightning illuminated the image of you and...Wallace, you were not you.”
Of course I wasn’t me. I was crazy. I thought the ground was lava, although I do not remember the church. I didn’t even see a church near the playground. There was a piece of the mystery missing, a mammoth piece.
“I tackled you,” Gene continued. “You struggled to get free from me. I’m not sure you knew I was a person, let alone Gene del Gregory. I don’t expect you to remember any of this, Wallace. The hunger, it ate you.”
If only he knew what the hunger actually did to me, he would dance away from the subject. He saw something of it, though.
“I was eventually able to grab you and take you to the car. I hated what you looked like and I blamed it on that church. Probably very irrational, but I don’t care. I set the building on fire with the mere flick of a lighter. Hopefully that erased a lot of demons. Churches are usually full of them anyway. I made sure you slept, and that’s exactly what you did through the night.”
“Can I talk now, Gene?”
The man gave me a stern, cross look. “Yes.”
“Well, the first thing you should know is that I was on my way back to find you, wherever you were. My senses got the best of me and I lost it for a while. I don’t recall being in a church at any time. I don’t recall anything after the playground and the slide I was on when the ground was lava and those ostrich-like things were marching at me.”
“Ostrich?”
“Exactly, Gene. I was tired and hungry, among other things. Furthermore, I knew I shouldn’t have left. I was very upset about what I’d done and I could not face anybody at the time, not even you. Well, especially you.”
“It was wrong of me, Wallace.”
“Listen, it was bad, yes. But I blew up over it. Just like your super-Ire, you can’t control it.”
We apologized back and forth for many long minutes until eventually we were back to normal, like an old married couple. Things felt good, yet again. And I wasn’t hungry.
“So,” I said. “On to Oklahoma?”
“That was our destination all along. I do have to put more gasoline in the car, however. It is touching the E sign on the dial.”
As Gene slowly put gas in the tank of his car, I stretched, popped my knuckles, and checked on my leg wound. I was healing very nicely, no real pus or horrid signs of infection. Truthfully, I hadn’t paid much attention to the injury, as it was a gash in the flesh and nothing more. If under any other less urgent circumstances, perhaps the wound would have been a much larger issue.
We were ready to go. A can of beans to munch on along the way seemed optimal.
“I need a can,” I told Gene as he entered the driver’s seat.
“A can?”
“Food, Gene. I’m going to get hungry again. Open the trunk.”
“You should be fine. No need.” He quickly surveyed the area. “Besides, the cans are now in the floorboard of the backseat. Get one of those.”
“You moved them?”
“Just get a can, Wallace. We need to head out before it gets too dark.”
Before it gets too dark? What did that matter? We’d been driving at night for a while. I realized Gene simply wanted to reach Oklahoma in decent time. I let it go and snatched up the small can of Eagle Boy pinto beans, the kind with the easy-open tab on its top. Then we were off.
“That smell,” I said. “Goddamn it, what is it?”
“We are funky. No bathing recently.”
“Shouldn’t we bathe, Gene?”
“In time, in time. We smell like this already, no need to rush out to get clean when the damage is done.”
I suppose he was right, although there was no harm in stopping by some body of water with the soap we had on-hand to desmellify just a little. The man was focused now and I had to appreciate that. Otherwise, m
y wanting to return and subsequent return would have been for nothing. I could not return to nothing. Not after this long.
~~~~
Chapter 21
BBQ
The sign on the not-so-overgrown two-lane road read Lyons 3 mi. This road, while drivable, could not have presented me with a more boring view on the planet. Straight, flat, long, just completely dull. It was for this reason that Gene and I chatted as we continued south in Kansas toward our goal. Our conversation after about four hours of driving in the night became somewhat deep, certainly deeper than we’d gotten since back at the development. This one was about religion.
“I was taught that God was all-everything,” Gene said. “He was it and nothing more, complete Baptist staples through and through. Question him? Then you question whether or not you want to go to heaven or hell. There was no questioning, lest ye be cast into judgment with the assured fires of Hell perpetuating thy soul eternally. Do this and all should work out.”
“Did it?”
“Wallace, I’ve killed countless people and, yes, I’ve taken bites of some. I’m heading for Oklahoma to find out whether my sister is alive or dead, and you are the only person I’ve talked to in person in twenty years. No, things didn’t work out. Didn’t work out for anybody, especially the ones who died at the beginning of the Ire. Anybody anymore would have to be the most skewed, most adamantly stupidly stubborn fool to think that such a god even exists these days.”
“What if I told you I still believe something is there, Gene?” I didn’t believe it, but I liked the conversation.
Gene leered over at me. “I know you too well, Wallace. You’re an independent thinker. Also, you’re just plain intelligent. Mathematics call it all out. Two plus two does not equal seven. Hell, based on my past with many people two plus two equals orange. No processing at all.”
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