Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  Deep Breath Hold Tight:

  Stories About the End of Everything

  Jason Gurley

  Copyright © 2014 Jason Gurley

  www.jasongurley.com

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

  Also by Jason Gurley

  Novels

  Greatfall

  The Man Who Ended the World

  The Settlers

  The Colonists

  The Travelers (forthcoming)

  Eleanor (forthcoming)

  Collections & Short Stories

  Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

  The Last Rail-Rider

  The Book of Matthew (The End of Greatfall)

  The Caretaker

  The Dark Age

  Wolf Skin

  Neptune Confidential

  Anthology Appearances

  From the Indie Side

  Synchronic: Thirteen Tales of Time Travel

  Help Fund My Robot Army!!! (forthcoming)

  The Robot Chronicles (forthcoming)

  For Janice Gruhn

  Table of Contents

  Wolf Skin

  The Caretaker

  The Winter Lands

  Nebulae

  Onyx

  The Last Rail-Rider

  The Dark Age

  Dear Reader

  About the Author

  Cutting a person’s throat is not as easy as I thought it would be.

  I remember the old movies — rich and colorful distractions from the days none of us knew were coming. In the movies, the villain draws a blade over a person’s throat like a marker, and the throat opens like a peach, juicy and bright. Maybe in the movies their knives were sharper than real ones. The movies don’t tell you that skin makes a sound when it tears, that you have to put shoulders and weight into the cutting — that the cutting is not an easy thing, but that you have to saw.

  The movies don’t teach you which way to lean to avoid the spray of blood. They don’t tell you that blood is hot, that it stinks of sour copper.

  They don’t teach you that a person fights to their final breath, kicking and squirming in a fountain of red, that their breath turns pink like winter mist.

  They don’t tell you that sometimes the person stares at you with eyes so wide that it’s as if their lids have been cut away, their pupils wide to drink in all of their last light. They fix on you, stare at you. You’re the last thing they see, until their eyes wander, their focus lost, and they stop struggling. They twitch like dead birds, little last muscle spasms turning them into grotesque, dancing marionettes.

  There isn’t supposed to be time to notice such things. In my world, you’re expected to cut the throat and move on. There are more of them to catch, more necks to saw open. Only the men, though. If you’re fortunate enough to catch a woman or a child, you leave their necks alone.

  “Take a hand from the women,” Grant said during my first raid. “They’ll be grateful you didn’t take more.”

  From the children, he explained, you take nothing. They will need their hands and their strength. You leave their bodies alone.

  “Make them hold their mother’s arm when you take her hand,” he said. “Let them cling to their father when you open his neck.”

  That was how you built an army these days.

  So said Grant.

  I remember video games.

  Loud, vibrant worlds filled with the staccato thumping of gunfire. The rush of voices in your ear — other players, somewhere else in the world, calling you terrible names. In some of those games, cutting a person’s throat was as easy as pulling a plastic trigger, as tapping a little green button. Entire populations could be vanished into history with presses of little buttons.

  These days you have to take them apart person by person.

  In the last of days, the games were almost real themselves. You could walk a character into an open field and stand there quietly, and just look around and appreciate beauty. Rendered forests rose up into perfect blue skies. Sun filtered through the branches in lazy beams. Flares of light washed out your vision if you looked at it too closely. The hum of cicadas would swell up to fill your character’s silence. You could hear your own footsteps, different each time, crunching on cold winter grass or squelching in mud. The occasional bird flapped overhead, silent but for the shadow it cast on the ground at your feet.

  At night I dream of video games, of those worlds. I dream in greens and blues and pinks.

  When I open my eyes each morning, I see browns and grays. The world I see is only a memory of my childhood. The land is infertile and dry, the mountains cracked and flaking away like brittle scabs on the earth. Every river runs black and slow, or has long ago dried. I haven’t seen a living animal in months. The skies are thick like sand, the sun just a dim glow behind toxic clouds.

  The weapons I hold are nothing like the games. Strapped to my hip is a pistol, but the spinner-thing falls out sometime. I don’t fire it because I’m certain it will explode, and I’ll lose a hand like the women who walk the rope line. My knife is short and dented and flecked with rust, and hasn’t been sharp since before I found it stuck in a fencepost.

  I look down at my hands. They used to hold those video game controllers. They used to be pale and a little soft. Now the dirt has been driven so deep into my pores that my skin is mottled and dark. My fingernails are caked with black. Old blood has stained my skin the color of rust. It’s hard to tell which blood is mine.

  The bright days of my memory are recent enough that I still sometimes wake from sleep into them. It doesn’t seem possible, once my head clears, but for a moment I still hear the sounds of my father busying himself in the kitchen, of my mother starting the car and leaving for work.

  I didn’t know why Grant needed an army.

  I wouldn’t consider our bunch to be anything like an army at all. We were like a pack of wolves, moving over the land in a broken line, drawing blood from anything that opposed us. We took what we could, and sometimes we killed for things only to drop them hours later, tired of carrying them.

  Armies usually fight other armies, but what we did was horrifying. We would find a camp, or a little town, and we would separate into small knots and hunt. “Look for lights,” Grant always said. “Lights mean life.”

  So we did. There wasn’t electricity anymore, but if we saw electric light it almost certainly meant we were going to find a stockpile. Some man with a shotgun and a thousand rounds, hunkered down in a house with a generator and enough canned food for a year. Guys like that were easy — they almost always shot themselves after realizing we were going to get in one way or another.

  Mostly we saw campfires. We raided in the middle of the night. Fires were easy to spot, even if they were dying down to embers. And all of the old battle tropes held true, I guess. Grant always said the best time to stage an attack was four o’clock in the morning, just before the sun came up, when the night watches got lazy and before the sleeping soldiers began to stir. That’s what we did, and he was right, mostly.

  Except these weren’t soldiers. They were never soldiers.

  Looking back I think what surprises me most is that the change happened so quickly. Within weeks of the first bombs, the sky had turned the color of dull rust, and people began to wear masks to filter out the fine black debris. The masks turned black, too. Not every town was hit,
but every town came apart like a flimsy paper castle. It was dark all the time, almost, and the dark brings out the worst in a person. Ordinary people started looting and panicking. They kicked in their neighbors’ doors and stole what they could, and took by force what they had to. Insurance agents were shot down in their yards by bank tellers. Church folk really lost their shit, especially the ones who were convinced that Jesus had come back and forgotten all about them.

  People turned into animals practically overnight.

  They forgot what it felt like to sit down at a table for dinner, forgot the calm heat of a drawn bath. They forgot about thinks like shaking hands or saying hello. Before too long, if you were to see another person out in the open, you learned you were safest if you considered that person an enemy, and shot them down first. Only one thing mattered: yourself.

  I remember the first time I saw a pack like ours.

  I had found myself an apartment in a cluttered complex in a destitute part of my hometown. It made sense to me, an apartment. There was only one way in, one way out. I could barricade the door and stay relatively safe, and that’s what I did. I pushed the dead refrigerator and a china cabinet in front of the door, and unhooked the washing machine — it was one of those double-stacked units with a dryer built-in — and hefted that into place, too. I figured that somebody could probably get in with enough leverage. But the apartment door faced a narrow walkway that was seven levels up. It was three feet from the door to the wrought-iron railing. Not enough room to get enough guys in there to push hard.

  Every day or two, I heard the sounds of doors being kicked in all over the apartment complex. Sometimes they’d get to mine, and I’d hear someone kick really hard, and I’d see the refrigerator jolt a fraction of an inch, and maybe they’d kick again. But they always gave up.

  In the little bathroom there was a window that looked down over the lawn and the street behind the apartments. I kept the window closed, even though the apartment had grown stuffy in the heat. I had seen someone down there throwing rocks at the building. The rocks were wrapped in knotted rags, and they were burning. I didn’t think anybody could hit the small bathroom window, much less throw something through the window from so far down — but why take chances? Better to be sweaty and uncomfortable than to be smoked out into the open.

  There were screams all the time at first. I could hear them at night when I slept, could hear them during the day when I huddled in the apartment. I saw a woman raped in the middle of the street, and I watched from the bathroom window as someone came to her aid and pummeled her attacker with a baseball bat. Then the rescuer beat the woman to death, too, and ran away, nothing gained or lost by the encounter.

  That was how quickly the world had changed.

  I lived in the apartment for three weeks, rationing what little food was already inside, and the little I’d brought in my pack. The former occupant must have been at work when things went down, or I’d have had to fight them for the apartment for sure. I thought about them sometimes. There were photos on the bookcase in the apartment’s lone bedroom — pictures of families and groups of people. The one constant in the photos was a man with dark hair and thick glasses. I guessed that this was his apartment. I found a stack of paid bills on the kitchen counter, all addressed to Kevin J. Francoeur.

  Before long I was talking to the guy. I didn’t even notice at first, but maybe in retrospect it was better than talking to myself.

  Kev had a thing for Campbell’s soup, for which I was grateful. The apartment pantry was well-stocked with the stuff — mostly chicken and stars. Not chicken noodle, but chicken and star-shaped pasta. Kev had a big-kid streak running through him. But there were other ones, too — ham and beans, chunky beef and vegetables. I sawed them open with a bent can opener I found in a drawer, and sipped from them, rationing them out over the course of two days each.

  I got used to the growling of my stomach.

  There was all kinds of food in the refrigerator, mostly frozen stuff, but without electricity or gas, I couldn’t prepare any of it, and I certainly couldn’t save it. I waited for nightfall and opened the bathroom window and one by one pushed the frozen Hungry Man dinners out into the dark and listened to them clatter like heavy books to the ground below.

  I was in the middle of doing this one night when I first saw the marauders. They were just shadows, but my eyes were well-adjusted to the night. I had no light in the apartment. I stopped dropping food out of the window and ducked, even though at this height I didn’t think I was visible. I cranked the window shut quietly, and after a few minutes I peeked out again.

  They were like panthers in the dark, slinking between cars and through trees and over fences. I watched a few of them band together here and there and kick their way into the darkened old houses. Mostly they came out empty-handed. Most of the people had long fled, or been killed and robbed already.

  I was terrified by the sight of a man creeping over the apartment lawn, his neck clearly craned upward as he studied the windows. I leaned away from the glass, and when I looked back down he was standing directly below my window, seven stories down, kicking at the frozen dinners. He picked one up and shook it, then stepped back several yards and stood there in the dark, staring up. I didn’t dare move — I thought that if I moved he might see me, and if I didn’t, he might mistake me for a shadow or a curtain.

  He moved on, dropping the box and rejoining his partners, and they disappeared down the street. I heard someone’s car alarm cry out a few minutes later, and then I heard gunshots, and then the night was quiet again.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. I knew that the world had changed, and that the odds were incredibly high that one day, men like that would find me and that would be that.

  And that happened, eventually.

  Except they didn’t kill me.

  They kept me.

  I’ve been a part of Grant’s gang for — I don’t even know how long. Years. I remember that I was twenty years old when I holed up in that apartment. I was a college student — on the verge of dropping out, if I’m honest — and I worked in the campus bookstore for a few bucks. I was lean then, and I’m leaner now, but somewhere along the way the shape of my bones changed. My shoulders broadened, my neck stretched. I am taller, and wider, and from time to time when I catch a glimpse of myself in a window that hasn’t already been busted-out, I stop and stare at the Neanderthal I have become. I have a beard — everyone in the clan has beards — that has grown thick and long. It crawls up my face towards my eyes, and its weight draws it down in a heavy hank. My hair is long and tangled. I only have one of my ears. A young father bit the other off when I helped Grant and two other men take his wife and his daughter away from him. Grant showed me how to open the man’s belly just so, and I watched the man stare at his own insides spilling onto the cabin floor.

  Ten years, at least. Maybe more. Which would put me at thirty. Had I followed my parents’ path, by thirty I should have been a father myself, with a couple of little ones and a wife and a small, probably rented house. I’d be working as a teacher, or a tech support manager, or something like that. I’d come home to my kind wife and well-behaved kids.

  And then someone would take them from me and pour my guts out in front of me.

  I have seen more death than my father ever did. He skipped Vietnam by marrying my mother and having me. I think sometimes of his own father, Grandpa Mickey, who fought in Europe. I sometimes think that Grandpa Mickey and I might have something in common now. He’d always thought of me as gentle and soft, the kind of child who lived in books and movies and video games, who took a punch from a bully and didn’t swing back, who maybe still wet the bed.

  Grandpa Mickey would be terrified of me now.

  When we raid a town, Grant lets us take whatever we want, so long as we can carry it without dragging down the clan. Over the years we’ve accumulated a lot of things, and a lot of ways to carry them. Our clan moves more slowly now than it once did. We used to run on f
oot like warriors, old blades hanging from our shoulders, pistols on our hips, stuffed into pockets. We were comparatively small then, maybe fifty or sixty strong.

  There are four hundred or more of us now. Most are hunters and raiders like me, the workhorses of the clan. We’re dirty and we smell like sweat and blood and we bunk down in groups every evening, sometimes in abandoned houses, sometimes in the open. We carry tents. Grant has one of his own, and five or six of the women share it with him at night. We have animals — a few tired old mules, a horse or two — and they pull old flat wagons piled high with our things. One of the men has learned how to siphon gas from the underground reservoirs, and so a pair of old flatbed work trucks follows in our wake, gear lashed in place. Most of it is food stores we’ve stolen along the way. Not that there’s much food after all this time.

  We pick up domesticated animals when we find them, and tie them to the truck rails. They plod along beside for as long as they can, and when they fall over, they become rations for the men. Skinny old cows, shaggy sheep with dirty, matted wool. Sometimes dogs that have gone feral.

  You do what you have to these days.

  When I was fourteen, my high school drama class took a field trip to Los Angeles. Our instructor was friends with a woman who worked at Warner Brothers, and she had arranged a backlot tour for us. We wandered fake studio streets, stared up at familiar two-dimensional facades. The water tower with the WB logo loomed overhead. It reminded me of cartoons. We saw classic old cars — the orange General Lee, the psychedelic Mystery Machine.

  My father had been reluctant to sign the permission slip. Mom and I had pressed him. She was convinced that he was resentful of my “soft” upbringing, my interest in the arts. I had a feeling it was something else — Dad and I had wonderful conversations about movies sometimes, and I don’t think he resented me for loving anything. I think he resented himself for never allowing himself to.