The Populace

by Patterson, Aaron M.

  I was certain Gene would explode on me. How dare I speak like that? He would never bring harm to his sister.

  “I’ve thought about that too,” he said, to my surprise. “I can’t let Pauline know about this. But I also can’t tell when it’s going to come.”

  “Right now?”

  “No, Wallace, I don’t feel it now. I think it builds when I know I will be coming in contact with people. The party cabin, I could smell that literally a mile away. I knew they were close. Right now, at this station, nothing. And yesterday by the cemetery I saw a person walking far in the distance. Logic states I should have lost control and went for him. I didn’t. Something with me, just like there’s something with you. We’re poster boys for the last days of the Ire, Wallace.”

  Quite an admission from somebody who’d made the Ire even more destructive in the course of a month. Still, I couldn’t help but think Gene was onto something. Our circumstances were drastically different from only a little over a month ago. Flegtide? A change in the Ire? Did the Ire have a twenty year incubation period or something of the like before dying? Or was Gene’s off-and-on control over his urges simply a placebo brought on by the presence of his beloved sister? All questions that would likely never get answered, or at least not in my lifetime.

  “I hope your assessment of yourself is correct, Gene. It could get very ugly if it’s not. Like horrific.”

  He gave me a transitive look of derision as he put the empty gasoline can down. He even gazed at me as we both entered the car and shut the doors.

  It must have been an El Nino year or something because the sky, once again, began a terrific display of lightning in the distance with growing thunder approaching. It slightly illuminated the night-covered road back to the area of the cabins in the Fort Sill Development. We stopped close to Pauline’s cabin.

  “I smell something,” Gene said.

  “What? Food? Meaning humans?”

  “It’s odd, I don’t know. A mix of all of it, then again none of it. My senses are all fucked right now.”

  “Well let’s go see Pauline. See if she feels or smells it too.” I stepped out of the car.

  But Gene would not move. He kept his hands on the steering wheel and looked directly ahead. If I could think of one thing similar to his image at the moment, it was one of a man whose mind had entered a sudden state of utter confusion, as though nothing he’d ever known really was anymore.

  “Gene,” I said. “Gene, Gene, Gene!”

  “No,” he whispered.

  “No what?”

  “No.”

  Gene then put his shoe on the pedal and pushed it to the ground. The car sped off, almost taking out trees and even an electric pole. He was spooked. I was absolutely mortified, as this wasn’t typical, not even in the new regally disrupted mind of Gene del Gregory. None of it made sense. I needed to know if Pauline had said something to Gene.

  I turned and headed for her cabin along her walk. I could suddenly feel a charge in the air, thinking most certainly this was akin to what Gene had felt, or smelled. The smell was the same, but the sensation seemed unwelcoming. And when I entered Pauline’s cabin, I knew instantly everything was wrong.

  Pauline sat on the floor by her living room window in a large pool of blood mixed with pus and other odd liquids. Her right arm remained up on the window seal while her body was propped up under the window. Her face was three times its normal size with blood leaking from every orifice. She was very dead, and from the looks of it very painfully dead.

  I knelt on both knees beside her, not caring about the blood soaking my slacks. “Pauline,” I said amidst a cry. This saddened me tremendously. “I’m sorry we weren’t here when this happened.”

  I looked over the scene to find some culprit of this horrible occasion. She was bloated. Her eyes bled. Her body seemed to explode from within her flesh. It didn’t take long for me to conclude that the inordinate amount of Flegtide she’d taken over the past two days had killed her. I saw all the studies from Bern, and this was almost always the greatest side effect of prolonged and extreme use of the drug. She needed it to talk to her brother. That talk quickly took her life.

  Just like with Haydon so many years before, I stroked her head to somehow let her know a person was there at the end. Or in this case a little past the end, but close enough. Then the thought of Gene came to me. What would he think? How we he react? And did he know she was dead, thus the strange smells and sensations he got? I got it too, but it’s something along the lines of when a television gets turned off. The static change in the air is felt.

  I never thought for a moment that Gene had anything to do with her death. He wouldn’t do that. Furthermore, her death was undoubtedly caused by Flegtide and not Gene, who’d not been around her much of the day. His flight was caused by his timid nerves after feeling something new and uncomfortable.

  The options of how to handle this were limitless. Unfortunately, none of them when correct. No matter what road I went down, I envisioned not a single one to lead to the territory of Gene being well. I wasn’t even considering my own well-being, which I should have; my reason for leaving my cozy development life was dead beside my knees.

  “Wallace?” Pauline’s voice plainly said.

  I looked down at her quite alive body, not nearly as bloated as I’d seen when I walked in. “How...Pauline?”

  “Where is Eugene? I need to speak with him.”

  “He left but he will be back. Are you okay, Pauline? What happened to you?”

  “You worry too much, Wallace. Eugene was right about that. You overthink things and put imaginations in your head that don’t belong. You escape often. Your mind wanders, and often into weird and unreasonable places.”

  So much blood on the floor, her body once pale as snow, there was no sense in her living now. But she was there. “I go to these places involuntarily,” I said. “I don’t want to. I would like one place for the rest of my life and that’s it. I had that, Pauline. I loved my cabin. I had adapted to isolation very nicely. It was easy for me. I want it back. When you and Gene find your destination, I may retreat back to another one, maybe try to find a new development and try to become part of it.”

  “You’re not on the run, Wallace. You are free to do whatever. Remember that. And I would rethink your love for isolation. It causes you to do things you wouldn’t normally do. Not all of them good either.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as holding conversations with people who aren’t there.”

  I did not need any more explanation. I looked closer at Pauline. The truth melted back into my eyes. She truly was dead, the entire conversation in my head. She said those words, but it was my brain saying them through her imaginary voice. The paleness, the bloating, the death, it was all back in her where it belonged.

  It was apparent I wasn’t well. I’d killed, seen killings, and had just been a partner of death quite often in twenty years. This hurt the worst by a large margin. Seeing her lips move as she talked honestly felt extremely real, the hallucination so strong that my brain never had a chance but to believe it. I needed to leave. I dragged Pauline’s body, now twice the weight as it was when she was alive, over next to the fireplace. I propped her up in front of the fireplace, put a blanket over most of her body, and lit the fire with the wood already in it and some fluid on the mantle. In my mind, she deserved cozy scenery as her spirit lifted to wherever it would go.

  Time to leave. I wanted to get back to Minnesota as soon as possible. I left the cabin and went to the road beside her house, the fact that I would never see Gene again tattooed on my brain. I was done with this whole mess. I was done with that family, the ‘bond’, the cannibalism, all things I’d been through. The walk home started right now. I didn’t care about anything else.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 28

  Found

  Oklahoma is about five hundred miles from Minnesota. Okay, so walking twenty miles a day I’ll reach my development in a month
. There will be no obstacles. I won’t need food. To hell with bathing. I’ll drink the sweat from my forehead to fray thirst. I won’t eat, so I won’t shit. I’ll find a second wind some days and walk thirty miles. All worth it.

  All a lie. I was thinking these things as I started on my way back north. No road. I wanted the woods, to stay clear of possible would-be Evans’ and Customers. The trauma I’d endured would not puncture through the skin I put on after seeing Pauline’s dead body. In other words, I was in shock and had not yet soaked in how horrible things had become, allowing my mind to work worse than irrationally. It was along the lines of a fantastic high on a potent drug that didn’t seem to want to stop. I hadn’t slept in about forty hours either, adding to the madness.

  I caught myself before it went any further. “You idiot, break your own back!” I called out in the middle of a sweeping pine forest. I am not sure what that meant, but I remember saying it. I put my body in a thicket of pine needles, curled up in a ball, and fell asleep. No dreams. My brain would not permit them. Instead, I woke up in a broad, loud cry.

  Grief, once again delayed, finally broke into me. I cried rushing streams like never before. The world wanted me to cry, to keep going with the tears as much as possible. It required me to cry in the same fever it required me to kill the people I neared when Ired. So weep I continued, as though crying were a lost art.

  I did cry myself back to sleep, upon which time the dreams decided to crash through the barrier into my slumber. But my dream was quite unremarkable. Something about an airplane with porcupines for passengers. I saw a hand reach out from the sky, a big one, but all it did was give me a thumbs up before turning into a cloud in the shape of a large clock with its hands referring to the time of 5:19.

  Awaking was rather unremarkable as well. I just sat up slowly and remained that way, my legs sprawled out before me as my back quietly rested against a tree. The sun attempted to greet my face through the pines, but the forest was too dense to behold a full-on face bath of solar goodness. I heard birds chirping proudly all over. The air was cool, but not cold. It was simply perfect. For once, I was enjoying myself. It allowed me a moment to find myself, to not flee from the shit I was swimming in. The train of thoughts began, with a plan to come from it surely.

  Gene was gone, but may be back, or he may be looking for me. He would eventually find out Pauline was dead. I had to be the one to tell him so once the initial shock wore off he had someone with a dry shoulder. But in fact, I did not tell him. I was scared of his reaction. Once the Pauline situation settled, we would have to try to go back to Minnesota. There was no more dancing around the fact that the development was where we needed to go, as it was home for so many years and we had no other homes.

  The peace of the pine forest helped me regain my composure. I suddenly could feel the immense hunger in my stomach. Thinking back, I realized I hadn’t eaten in over 24 hours. Well over it, in fact. I headed back to the road to go back to the development, if I could find it. Getting to this forest was something of a blur in my head, so I was very ignorant to my location.

  All I could see before me was road, endless road. The heat of the early September sun created waves over the road. It was mesmerizing, and instantly taxing on my conscience. Still, I continued to walk. The hunger batted at me with the vengeance of a thousand rusty daggers, yet I continued. Insanity often tried to jump on my back, but I brushed it off every time—I was sick of temporarily losing my mind, hence my fervor to keep on with a straight head.

  Mirages come in all shapes and many different flavors. Some approach as a towering lizard beast with five heads readying itself to spray liquid fire at you. Some come on as a delicious beverage in a chilled glass. Others include anthropomorphized clouds, my aunt Trina, and a giant bowl of potato salad. This particular mirage was simply a car, a fast one, and it was coming right at me. It brushed away the dancing waves over the road. Although I knew it wasn’t real, I had to escape its path or suffer, well, something maybe. I leapt to the side of the road.

  The car then turned and stopped very quickly. The driver stepped out and began running toward me. It looked a lot like Gene from the distance. As he came closer I could see indeed it was Gene, his mirage appearing supremely life-like. He ran toward me, the shiny red stuff glistening his skin and ratty clothes in the midday sun.

  “Wallace!” he shouted with a pronounced echo of a dream, or mirage.

  “Get away,” I said. I wanted to stay on the ground. “I only want real things. Not you.”

  “What do you mean? Wallace, come on now.”

  Gene took me by the arm and stood me up before helping me the three hundred or so feet to his car. Quite accurate for a mirage. It wasn’t long before I realized this was real, that it was Gene and not my mind playing tricks.

  I sat in his car. “It’s you?”

  “That’s what I have been trying to tell you, Wallace. I nearly struck you down with my car.”

  “And why would you do that?”

  As I gradually gained my senses, Gene went silent and almost numb. He had a hard time answering my question. And yes, he was covered in blood. He also smelled of death, an odor I recognized back at Pauline’s cabin amongst many other occasions.

  “Why no answer, Gene?”

  “You’re dehydrated and famished, Wallace. We need to get some food in you.” He reached behind the seat to pull out an extra-large can of pinto beans. He opened it using the connected tab at the top. “Just some beans. Try a little at first.”

  But I wouldn’t eat. I couldn’t after seeing what guilt he poorly hid in his eyes. He’d come from feasting, from eating an ungodly number of people. He was driving fast to run me down so he could harvest me before he knew it was his dear friend Wallace Auker.

  “You nearly killed me,” I said. “And that blood.”

  Rather than deny guilt, Gene fell to his knees and began to cry deeply into his open hands. Was this an act? He’d never shown remorse for his cannibalism before.

  “Something,” he said. “Wallace, something happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s Pauline. Her cabin was torched. She was inside. Inside, Wallace! I found the remains of her body in what used to be her living room!”

  Torched? Impossible. I lit the fireplace using the appropriate technique and just a little fluid. And I placed her many feet from the fire with the blanket. Oh, the blanket. It was big and thick. And yes, one end had to be too close to the fire. This was my doing, her death on my hands. Was this my sixth and final kill? No, for Pauline was dead from Flegtide use long before the fire.

  “Are you sure she was inside?” I said, feigning an inquisition.

  “It was her fucking body, yes! I had her, Wallace, and now I don’t. It’s the same goddamn mess all over again.”

  “Where were the development fire trucks?”

  “Trucks? There’s no fire department in the developments anymore, Wallace. Christ, I don’t even think developments even exist anymore. The world is beyond control since Flegtide came along. I saw it. I saw people doing worse things to others than I’ve done. I kid you not. That development had about ten cabin fires yesterday. And I was going to describe all this to Pauline before we left for an island.”

  “Island?”

  “Yes, a fucking island, Wallace. One off the coast of Louisiana our family vacationed at when we were kids. Pauline would love the idea. Just her and me, living from the land, nobody out there to give us the Ire. And of course, no fucking Flegtide. That fucking drug!”

  He was a thinking man, for sure. Gene pined for peace ultimately, as long as it was with his sister. He knew it was lost and that hurt him worse than anything else.

  “Wallace, somebody killed my sister. Pauline was murdered by some piece of shit who may no longer be Ired but was so used to killing that he had to keep going with it. I bet all the fires in the development yesterday were from that bastard exclusively.”

  “And you want to hunt him,”
I surmised.

  “Well, of course I knew that would be my reaction. I surprised myself, though.”

  “How so?”

  “I immediately realized it would take time and I would never find him. Even if I thought I’d found him, I would always have doubts of whether or not he was the one. And really, that won’t bring Pauline back. I just want to go.”

  Please say you want to go back to Minnesota. If there is a God that still has an ounce of confidence in His human race, please let Gene say Minnesota.

  “What do you say, Wallace? You and I, somewhere in a place nobody else exists? The island?”

  I guess you don’t like any of us anymore. I don’t blame you.

  “What about Minnesota?”

  Gene slapped me hard across the right cheek. I didn’t deserve it, especially in my badly dehydrated, near-manic state.

  “Recall my previous statement, Mr. Auker. The developments are falling and fast. This is all over the world. I saw it on my cell today in addition to seeing it with my eyes. I highly doubt Minnesota Number-5 development was spared. There’s nothing to go back to. Humanity has to start anew.”

  The puzzle didn’t match up with me. Sure, Flegtide had its terrible side effects, but with limited use it should be bringing people together more, not causing anarchy. But I heeded Gene’s relay instead, opting to go with him to Louisiana. I truly had nothing left to live for. It was Gene or nothing. And being completely honest with myself, I tend to think I would have preferred nothing over Gene at the time, for nothingness wouldn’t be accompanied by all the pain he caused me. Death, if it happened, would have been a monumental relief. For this, I was not scared of a damn thing anymore.

  ~~~~

  Chapter 29

  Wish I Were Here

  Where does a man go when he has nowhere left to go? To where does a man descend when his descent has already plummeted him into an orgiastic cesspool of metaphorical and literal filth? He goes to Louisiana.