“This what Kate wants?”
“Who’s Kate?”
“Your goddamn wife. Is this what she wanted?”
“Sarah said we should get you. I wanted to go away for a few weeks. Leave the sick to tend the sick. Go up in the cove. When we came back it would all be over.”
Kate was behind this? And as soon as the question formed, I knew the answer. Yes. She wanted me to come for a reason.
Pete kept the gun aimed at my head. I nodded at him before turning my back and walking over to Kate’s horse.
As I walked I tried not to imagine the bullet tearing through my back. I tried to think of Kate. I tried to remember her when she was young, before she changed, before she began disappearing. These thoughts were hard and unsettled me greatly, so I listened to the baby’s screams fill the hollow.
I set her on the ground while I untied the horse. She flailed around in the dirt, and I remembered that she was naked. It didn’t matter.
After untying the horse, I lifted her into my arms and climbed on. I started back across the trash littered settlement and saw that Pete was still aiming the gun at me. Sonny, meanwhile, had come back outside and was leaned against the doorframe of his house. He was grinning.
I thought somebody might say something else, but nobody did, and even if they had, I wouldn’t have heard it over the screaming baby. I left them there, on the mountain and rode all day. When the darkness came, the little girl fell into a feverish sleep and in the silence of the night, I thought about Kate.
The Cecilia Paradox
We’ve been underground for 193 days when Henry sends his only begotten son, Ralph, to save us.
Ralph’s like eighteen and wears two big, diamond studs in each ear. He’s got a beard and long Jesus hair. His breath reeks of tuna fish, and don’t let him touch you because his hands smell like they’ve been places hands are not necessarily meant to go. Once, when I made the mistake of giving him a high five after my team won the New World Relay Race for a Better Tomorrow, my hand smelled like ass for hours.
There are only six of us. Survivors, that is. Or dumbasses. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. In order of how much I like them, they are
Cecilia
Theresa
Frank
Theo
Marjorie.
I hate Marjorie.
All of us signed up for some government survey. It paid
one thousand dollars, which is pretty good money, or was pretty good money. Now money is something you wipe your ass with when Dominic forgets to refill the toilet paper dispenser. Oh yeah, Dominic’s the custodian/muscle down here.
So Ralph trots around all day, speaking in parables and turning water into wine—“You have to use your imagination!” he says when Theresa points out it still looks like water after he’s muttered some mumbo jumbo over it—and raising little roaches from the dead. The roach thing is almost cool. After touching them with some holy water, he slides them across the concrete floor, and it’s almost as if they scurry, but their legs aren’t moving.
“So when’s the big man going to show?” Frank wants to know. I like Frank all right, but he’s a man, so I have to rate Cecilia and Theresa in front of him. Frank is the vocal leader of a group who believes this is all fake and we’re on a reality show.
“But how can it be a reality show if it’s all fake?” I ask.
“Exactly,” he says. “One day one of us is going out that door and when we do, we’ll see that everybody in the real world has got their damned TV’s tuned to channel 3, laughing their asses off.”
The others either pretty much agree with him (Theo, Theresa, and Marjorie) or pretty much think the whole concept is bogus (me). Cecilia doesn’t really have an opinion.
She just likes to sleep around.
I love Cecilia.
So what do you do when you go to an underground room that smells like an abandoned whorehouse/methlab and a screen comes down showing you footage of your family dying from some airborne disease? What do you do when the screen switches and shows people all over the place dying the same way? What do you do when it looks real? More real than any of the movies? What do you do when a disembodied voice named Henry—who tells you right up front you should call him God—announces the old world is over and the new one has just begun? What do you do when he tells you, anyone may leave at anytime, the door is unlocked, but by doing so, you will be sacrificing his free gift of salvation and you will choke to death like the rest of the world he has chosen to forsake? What then?
Long answer: you agonize about the door, the world outside, the family that may or may not be dead, depending on how much technology this asshole has. You debate the merits of worshipping Henry (he is after all the man in charge) versus raging against him, and end up with a passive-aggressive stance, much like how a surly seventh grader would treat his pre-algebra teacher. You try to hook up with the girls. You fail. You meet Cecilia. You screw her twice before you find out she did Dominic four times and Theo (he’s missing an arm) once. You fall into an emotional abyss, driven to the depths by grief and guilt. Cecilia comes by and makes you feel better with a blowjob. You love Cecilia and think how you and she will run away through that door together someday and whatever is there—good, bad, ugly—you’ll find it together.
Short answer: nothing.
Originally there were eight of us. Sharon died when Henry showed her the footage of her son gagging on a pocket of bad air. His eyes popped out of his head and landed in his cereal. Sharon must have had a heart attack or something because she screamed once, swooned to the floor and died.
Then there was Freddie. Freddie’s like the antichrist around here. We all worship him, but Henry tells us he’s a false god and following him will lead to destruction and pain and our eyes popping out from all the bad air up there.
On the third day, Freddie rose from his tomb, amen. He asked me if I wanted to go with him. I told him I’d think about it. He promised to come back for us.
190 days later and no Freddie.
Marjorie asks me if I’m going to the Crucifixion later this evening.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“No, Adam. Henry’s serious about this. I think this may be the season climax.”
“There’s no one watching, Marjorie.”
She twists her long black hair and looks at me with those stupid, pouty eyes. Getting caught down here is probably the greatest thing that ever happened to her.
“Then leave,” she says.
“That doesn’t make sense,” I say. “If I think there is no TV show, it means I think there really was an airborne disease that killed everybody else in the world except us. It means I believe Henry is some kind of God or at least history’s greatest scientist.”
“Believe what you want. I don’t care. Like I said, you should just leave if you’re going to be so miserable. Go be like that idiot Freddie. I’ll bet everybody’s laughing at him right now.”
“Bitch.”
“Stupid fuck.”
I snarl, about to say something else nasty when the fire alarm goes off.
Fire alarm?
Henry’s voice booms over the loudspeaker: “This is not a drill. Report to the north exit immediately.”
I look at Marjorie. She shrugs. “Maybe it’s a ratings sweep.
We gather at the north exit, near the same brown door Freddie left by, months ago. Dominic hands out gas masks. I have to go to the bathroom.
“Hold it,” Dominic says.
I smell smoke. We line up. Frank’s behind me, saying he heard Ralph went nuts when Henry told him he was really going to crucify him and started a fire in the rec area.
“Henry told him he was really going to crucify him?”
Frank laughs. “Yeah. Henry is fucked up in the head. He really thinks he’
s God.”
“And you really think this is a TV show?”
“No fucking question.”
Dominic reaches for the door, resting his hand on the silver handle. “Get your masks on you two,” he says, gesturing at me and Frank. He pulls his own mask over his nose and mouth, adjusting the valve.
“I want to see Henry,” I say.
“Not possible,” Dominic says.
“He’s staying inside, then? With the fire?”
“He’s the big man,” Dominic says. “He calls the shots. Not you.”
And that’s that. I slide on my gas mask, Dominic opens the door. We shuffle out into the outside world. First time in 193 days.
They blindfolded us when they brought us to the survey. Top secret government bullshit. Just give me my cheque. I didn’t care. Blindfold? Sure. You still paying me one thousand dollars at the end?
I’ve got a new perspective now. Like a man might have after being in prison for a long time. What’s money? Shit. Money’s just paper or plastic. I want the air, the solid ground beneath my feet. I want the sun. These are the things that are real.
We’re behind a pockmarked brick building with no windows in a little alley. It’s dark out. I look up and see not a star in the sky, which would make sense considering all the bad air. Or it could just be cloud cover. The agony of not knowing is the worst.
Dominic looks like one of those guys you see in movies about World War I, holed up in his trench, waiting for the gas, waiting for the end.
“Face the building,” he says.
“Eyes in front of you,” he says.
“Keep those masks on. Stay together,” he says.
“This is all a big fucking joke,” he says. “But not, I repeat, not a reality show.”
Okay, he doesn’t really say those last two parts.
I’m trying to look around for something, anything that suggests people are still alive in the world. One good sign: I don’t see Freddie’s dead body anywhere. If he’d come out this door—which he did—his body would be somewhere over there by the end of the building. Hey, there is something over there. I crane my neck a little more for a better look and then WHAM. A big hand slaps the side of my face.
“Eyes in front. Face the building,” Dominic says.
But what was that thing I saw?
The rumours are true. Ralph started the fire when he used one of his cigarettes to light a roll of toilet paper in the john. Funny thing is, he was taking a dump at the time, the dumbass, and after the toilet paper burned down to nothing, he couldn’t even wipe.
This is our Messiah.
Henry announces it is time for the Crucifixion. We gather in the rec room wide-eyed and eager for some entertainment. Dominic stands, arms crossed by the double doors which lead into Henry’s lair, aka Heaven, aka the promised land, aka some dumpy office with black construction paper shrouding the windows so none of us can see in.
“I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash comes on over the loudspeaker. Henry is a devout old time country fan. We get treated to all the old timers: Hank Williams, Patsy Cline, Marty Robbins, and Willie Nelson before he discovered pot.
The volume is louder than usual, and we can tell Henry is trying to MAKE A STATEMENT. The doors next to Dominic fly open and Ralph comes out, dragging his cross on his back. He’s wearing a pair of gym shorts but otherwise naked. Dark red lashes run the length of his thin frame, and this almost startles me a little.
“So he really lashed him,” Frank mutters. “I wonder how much they’re paying Ralph to do this.” He whistles. “You think Henry spanked Ralph as a kid?”
There are so many responses I have for this question that my mind goes swimmy and I can’t say any of them, so I simply shrug and watch Ralph drag what looks like a cardboard cross.
“You’d think with all the CGI effects they used on the videos of our loved ones dying, they’d be able to afford more than a cardboard cross,” Marjorie says. “Very disappointing.”
Johnny Cash reminds us it’s because “you’re mine” that he walks the line, and Marjorie shoves me out of the way when Ralph passes by. Dominic is behind him. Marjorie believes the TV camera is hidden somewhere on Dominic’s massive body.
I drift to the back of our little group, where Cecilia puffs on a cigarette. She smiles at me. She looks hot. She’s got on my favourite gray mini and the red sweater that makes her breasts kind of perky and pendulous at the same time. Her hair is pulled back and her forehead shines with a sheen of sweat.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey,” she says, and it’s a hey with possibilities in the tone, a hey that suggests another blowjob could be in the cards as long as I play mine right.
“You know,” I say, “this Jesus stuff just isn’t the same when his hands smell like ass.”
“Fully God, fully man,” Cecilia says cryptically. That’s the other thing about Cecilia, the thing you forget about her because she’s hot and capable of mind altering blow-jobs: she’s really kind of smart. Maybe too smart to be here with the rest of us doofuses. Maybe Freddie smart.
“So what’s that mean?”
She shrugs as Ralph climbs onto a stage Dominic constructed last week and lays his cross down on a chair. He looks dazed.
“Drugged,” Frank says. He’s in front of me and Cecilia. “He’s been drugged.”
“Fully God, fully man. It’s Biblical,” Cecilia says. “The Bible says Jesus was a paradox. Fully God and fully man at the same time.”
Dominic is nailing the cardboard cross to the wall. Ralph watches him, red eyed and stoned.
Cecilia takes my hand. “I don’t want to see this,” she whispers.
“Nah,” I say. “Crucifixions bore me.”
We head to our spot, the third stall in the men’s restroom. It’s one of those handicap deals, so there’s extra room and a bar for Cecilia to hang on to when I’m doing her from behind.
She locks the door and gets right to work, unbuttoning my pants and breathing all heavy.
When it’s over, we both lay on the floor, exhausted.
Cecilia speaks first. “I really hate myself sometimes.”
“Me too,” I say, not catching the edge of seriousness in her voice, well at least not at first, not until it is too late.
Luckily she ignores me. “This sex stuff. It’s an addiction, you know.”
This time, I stay quiet and wait for more. She’s quiet too. Finally, she sits up and pulls her sweater back on, sans bra which is still laying where I dropped it, on the back of the toilet. “He’s probably dead by now, you know.”
“Who?”
“Ralph. The Son of Man. Whatever you want to call him. He’s probably already bled to death on the cross for nobody’s sins but Henry’s.”
“Do you think Henry really killed him?”
She moves to the toilet where she sits to pee. “I know he really killed him. He’s been talking about it for weeks.”
“You talk to Henry?”
She tears some toilet paper off the roll and smirks. “Do you really think Henry’s God, Adam? Of course, I talk to him. He’s a man. You’re a man. Think about it. As a man, would you not talk to me?”
I start to form an answer, but my mind is moving too slowly, trying to put it together. Cecilia and Henry. Henry and Cecilia.
She keeps talking instead of waiting for me to answer: “And me? I’m a sex addict. That’s why I don’t mind this place so much. All these men, young and old. No wives to get in the way.” She pouts and pulls her panties and miniskirt up. “I hate myself.”
“Why?”
She frowns, her brown eyes going serious and sad. “You’re just like the rest of them. You only want me for the sex. You don’t even listen to me when I talk.”
“No, Cecilia.” I stand up, amazed a little by t
he intensity in my voice. It must catch Cecilia off guard as well, because she tilts her head to the side as if seeing me new for the first time.
“I do care about you. I want out of this place. Am I the only one who wants out? Do you want out?”
“I don’t know what I want. I thought I wanted to have sex anytime I wanted it, with any man I wanted. I’ve got that now, sort of. You, Henry, Dominic, Theo. Frank.”
“Frank? He’s like seventy.”
“I don’t discriminate. Besides, he’s a freak of nature.”
“Come again?”
“Never mind.”
I don’t get mad. Not exactly. Just frustrated. Disappointed. Here I am thinking this girl likes me, but all she’s concerned about is finding the next dick.
“I knew you’d get mad,” she says. “If it makes you feel any better, I hate myself for being this way. I really do. And another thing. What we just did. Just a minute ago. It was special. More than just my addiction. I like you, Adam.”
This is maddening. Maddening because I want to hate her but when she says something like this I can’t hate her. In fact, I think I love her.
“You know what,” I say, my voice rising. “You’re a paradox. Fully slut and fully . . .” I hesitate, not knowing how to end it. From the look on her face, she is not hurt by the fully slut remark, so I reach for something else, some extreme that will satisfy both ends of her paradox, and settle on “. . . Fully slut and fully angel.” It comes out silly sounding and sentimental, but she doesn’t seem to mind. She softens, brown eyes doing this little flash before going all sweet.
She comes over and hugs me. “That’s the nicest thing anybody ever said to me, Adam.” She holds me, not letting go and there is no sex vibe in this embrace, a first in all my encounters with Cecilia. She whispers in my ear. “You’re different.”
I whisper back, “I saw something outside. The day of the fire. I think it might have been a body.”
They’ve killed him. Nailed him to the wall. He’s still hanging there now. I would worry more about who is going to be next, but I think Henry has made his point. Today at lunch, he called for mandatory prayer time. Communing with Him, he said. We were supposed to lay prone on the floor and repeat some stupid mantra. I refused. Everybody else went down, the bloody spectre of Ralph hanging over them like a reminder that we may not serve God, but we serve Henry, and Henry is a vengeful, well, Henry.
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