by McBain, Tim
Rural Maryland
9 years, 38 days after
Tonight was the night, Father reassured himself. No turning back now. Everything would be fine.
He’d planned to take one of his trips, his spirit journeys, and see what some strange blend of plant extracts might tell him about his situation, about the camp’s situation. But now, as the time drew near to ingest the DMT, he found himself growing nervous. Fidgeting on the couch in his darkened living room. Not quite able to get his lower back into a comfortable position.
Fiona mixed the brew even now. Readied the strange beverage for his ritual, for his walk into another world. She believed in it, believed in the visions the drug gave him. Maybe they all did, all the people in camp, all the followers.
A shaman was one who walked between the spirit world and our world, one who could touch the other side, pass through some doorway most could never find. The people in the camp believed this to be true of Father, and sometimes, every once in a while, he believed it as well, but only when he looked at it out of the corner of his eye, avoided staring at the thing straight on.
The funny thing was all of this had started out as something to try, another drug to kill some time like all the pills he took. Just good clean drugged out fun, thank you. Nothing too heavy.
But somewhere along the way, as the years went by, and he tripped his way deeper and deeper down into the rabbit hole of whatever subconscious access this strange drug allowed, he started to believe the things it showed him, the feelings it gave him. Started to open his heart to something bigger than himself, even if he was never quite sure exactly what it was or what it meant.
Spiritual experiences? Maybe. Sometimes he thought so. Sometimes not. Meaningful experiences? Yes. This he believed completely.
It was an inward trip, a journey to the center of his being. A glimpse at the inner workings of his brain, a long hard stare into the murk of the subconscious, for better or worse. And great insights could be found there, even if they were often cryptic, fragmented, too heavy to hold onto for long.
The powerful hallucinogen DMT could be harvested from the bark of many trees, mostly varieties found naturally in South America, Australia and a few other places where the drug had been used for centuries as part of Shaman’s spirit journeys. How some of those trees wound up growing here in rural Maryland, Father didn’t know. Probably cultivated by a particularly ambitious recreational drug user — especially since these particular specimens had been found in small raised beds of dirt in a residential area, a pair of cinder block clad rectangles alongside an apartment building. They’d hardly sprouted there by accident.
Anyway, scavengers had found these particular trees and identified them some time ago — it must have been six years now, hard as that was to believe — and so began Father’s spirit journeys. The ritual.
Fiona brought out the tray and placed it on the coffee table in front of his couch, two mugs rising up from the flat platter. The liquid inside rippled as the platter touched down, circular swirls like a disturbed pond, a fluid about the color of a cappuccino inside a pair of white mugs. It looked darker than usual this time, he thought. Perhaps it’d be more potent as well.
Tonight the drug was to be ingested via two teas, one and then the other, though “tea” was a kind word to describe the dark gloop currently waiting in the mugs before him. It tasted more like dirt and mildew and pond scum, Father thought, each tea a proprietary blend of awful flavor.
He sipped at the first mug. He’d typically chugged it in the past, until one time, it came right back up to stain a patch of linoleum in the kitchen a dark brown that reminded him of Sumatran coffee. Violent retching. He thought he’d torn something in his esophagus, he’d heaved so hard. Better to take it slow, he figured, after that. Sip it. Suffer through it. But keep it down.
He’d smoked crystals of the stuff one time, which tasted like plastic and gave a much different experience entirely. A violent hallucination that thrust him out of this plane of reality altogether for about fifteen minutes — he’d found himself in a doctor’s office during this trip, getting an injection from a physician he didn’t recognize, though he hadn’t found this alarming in the least. There was something weirdly routine about it, something more life-affirming than anything else. The vision had burned so vividly in his mind that he thought of it now more as a memory than a drug dream.
The first mug emptied into his maw at last, the last sip of it draining down the hatch. He thumbed one drop that had spilled down his lip onto his chin and pushed the moisture toward his mouth, sucked it down. Better to get the full dose, the whole thing, even if this batch was more potent.
He took a few breaths. Let his body rock up and down with each inhale and exhale. And then he went to work on mug number two.
This tasted worse than the first. More bitter. Thicker viscosity. The darkness of it coming through loud and clear. It was almost like a drinking strange muddy licorice juice. He could feel the sediment clinging to his teeth, black gunk adhering itself to his gumline like swamp muck.
His tongue started to tingle, pins and needles pricking the tip and spreading toward the back until the whole thing throbbed like a limb gone to sleep. Then it went numb. His lips next, then the gums. This had never happened to him before, not in all his years imbibing this foul drink. More potent, indeed, he thought.
He didn’t stop drinking it, though. Better to power it down, break through to see what might lay on the other side, to touch whatever wound the Earth would reveal here.
He tried to picture his tongue as it must look now, stained black from this muck, all those minuscule bumps and cracks and tiny curved hairlines, that strange tongue texture of whorls and divots, painted dark with sludge. He stuck it out of his mouth, wagged it off to each side, trying to get a glimpse. The pointed bit he could actually see looked normal enough. Pink. Maybe the slightest shade darker than usual, but that could be his imagination.
He went to take another sip of the stuff, and then he realized that he was already done. He tipped his head all the way to get those last few drops, the black sludge sliding down the side of the mug like some awful slime creature from the bottom of the sea.
He then slammed the mug down on the table like a gavel. A simple announcement communicated with this gesture: another mug down the drain, if it pleases the court. And please the court, it did. It pleased the court mightily, or him anyway, and he was the only judge around these parts, wasn’t he?
Now he’d wait. Wait for the drugs to take hold. Bend his mind like a spoon. Allow it to whisk him away to some other land.
He sat. Listened to the tick of the grandfather clock at the other end of the house. The little tap that kept the time out loud.
A powerful flash blinded him. Everything going white. Impossibly bright. The room around him gone, the world as he knew it gone. Only the white emptiness, the painful flare of light from everywhere, everything, always.
And then he blinked, and the world repopulated around him. Not his world. Another.
First, he smelled popcorn. Fresh popped popcorn. Potent and pleasant. The smell hung around him, thick in the air here, dominating his senses.
Instead of his couch with the coffee table sporting two empty mugs still sludged with black muck, he found himself standing in the lobby of a movie theater, one he’d never been to before. He waited, it occurred to him, in the concession line, tucked between two other customers — a big-haired lady in front of him playing with her phone, and a kid behind him of maybe twelve wearing a shirt featuring some superhero he’d never heard of.
Red and black carpet lined the room, plush beneath his feet. And neon lights formed strange curling swirls along the walls. Pink and blue strands intertwining like glowing veins.
He took a breath, felt a hitch in his throat. Overwhelmed, almost. Overstimulated.
He felt good, though. Not alarmed by this change of scenery. A good overwhelmed, if that were possible. Excited. Like maybe he was about t
o go see something he’d been wanting to for a long time.
And he realized what was overwhelming was how completely he felt that the world had been restored. He’d been thrust back into the old way, and it didn’t feel foreign. It felt right. He accepted it without hesitation, without any real adjustment. Accepted it like he’d been waiting for it all along.
He recognized a face on one of the posters along the wall, an actor he liked. The guy from The Matrix. He couldn’t remember his name just now, though, his ability to call words to mind seeming sluggish, his language skills altogether a bit off. Blunted.
The world was experienced as a series of feelings first and foremost, all attempts to explain any of it becoming a secondary thing. Distant. Delayed. Any kind of thought was rendered less important than the moment itself to the point where it bordered on insignificant.
Only the now was real. Only the here and now. All else was an abstraction, a distraction, missing the point of existence.
And it occurred to him then that the actor looked different than he remembered. His face changed. Wrinkled. Old. He was old now. Weathered.
This wasn’t a vision of the past then. It was the future. A different future.
Another version of the world. Another timeline, he thought. A version of reality where the plague never happened. A better world, if only by some stroke of luck.
His body tingled with the thought. Those earlier pins and needles from his tongue now reappearing on his arms, his legs, the small of his back.
The big-haired lady slid off to the left, taking her popcorn and beverage. She pushed through a door with the number three on it, disappeared into one of the theaters.
His turn in line came up. The teenage kid behind the concession stand gave him that expectant look, chin tilted up, finger waiting on the screen before him to ring up the order. And he asked for popcorn with extra butter and some gummy bears. He wanted worms, but they only had bears. Bears were still good, though.
Pepsi to drink. No ice.
And life made some kind of terrible sense again. Easy. He asked for something, and he got it, and things could really be that simple, that convenient. No problems. Nothing terribly complex about any of it.
Another bright flash of white brought his couch back beneath him, brought back his coffee table sporting the tray with the two sludgy mugs. He was home again — feeling strange, but home nevertheless.
And somehow this vision brought him relief. The world would go on, he knew now.
After all the Lucas talk, all the war talk, that notion came with a kind of release of tension.
With him or without him, it seemed, somehow, to matter less than before. If things went for the worse, if he fell in some way, the world would go on without him. If not this one, then others.
Maybe he didn’t need to worry about it all, about Lucas, about the camp. Maybe it was always going the way it was going, no matter what. The string of events set into motion by accident, spinning onward and outward, eventually to shape this place for better or worse.
But there were other worlds, infinite variations, infinite reflections, all warped slightly from each other like funhouse mirrors, and thinking of it that way, what happened here was less real, mattered that little bit less.
This world was just one of the infinite. Just one of the countless versions of the universe. Just one.
Lorraine
Rural Tennessee
1 year, 55 days after
Three days.
They’d been in the car for three days.
A strange delirium was beginning to set in. A kind of madness.
Lorraine’s thoughts spun out of the here and now, pulled her out of the moment into memories and dreams. Dark visions. Painful images burning bright in her mind.
She relived the death of her husband. Watched the dead thing lurch out of the dumpster. Latch onto his shoulders like an undead backpack. And bite. And rip. And defile.
Then she replayed the moment she’d found out that Ray was gone. Louis coming to the house. Breaking the news in a soft voice. She knew right away, before he even got the words out. And she remembered how empty that felt. A wholly different kind of horror. Somehow just as visceral without seeing the violence up close.
But the shuffling corpses outside always brought her back from these movies in her head. The faint scuffs of their feet turned to slurps and sucking sounds by the wet. Like the ground itself was a child eating with its mouth open. Noisy. Vulgar. Nauseating.
And still the rain beat down. Pinged on the roof. Pelted the herd of corpses. Saturated that layer of garbage and lumber strewn over the ground, kept the mud below nice and soupy.
It poured and poured, and it would never end. Lorraine knew that now. It would never fucking end.
She and Louis took turns crawling into the backseat to shit or piss in the cooler. If they picked their spots, waited for gaps in the action, they could dump it out the window without the dead taking notice.
It was a relief to get the waste out of the car. A few fleeting seconds of euphoria accompanied each emptying of the shit cooler.
But it reduced a person to live like this. Even for a few days, a few hours. Reduced them to an animal.
It wore on her. Took something from her.
She was a pregnant animal. A body made of bone and blood. A collection of functioning cells. Nothing more.
The smell lingered. Better to get the waste out of the car, yes, but it was still near. And the cooler itself reeked upon opening it. That raw sewage stench that used to drift out of the sewage processing plant down the road from where she grew up and peel the paint off every house within a couple square miles of the damn thing.
The cooler had turned into a multi-tasker. They had been somewhere deep in the south, maybe along the Georgia-Florida border, when Louis had had the idea to use the cooler. If they stored beverages deep in a lake or stream for a bit, they could get it chilled. Packing enough cool things in the cooler, they could keep them cold for a while. Not long. A few hours at most. But after all these months drinking warm water, even a semi-cool beverage was something to savor, especially on the hot days.
Now it was a shit bucket.
“I think they’re starting to scatter,” Louis said, his voice just above a whisper. He nodded his head toward the shambling corpses out there. “Little by little, they’re wandering on. Looking for food and whatever.”
He pawed at the stubble on his chin before pointing at the crowd. He went on, a lightness in his voice. Childlike somehow.
“Look at that. I mean, the mob looks a bit thinner, doesn’t it?”
Lorraine gazed over the horde. She didn’t see any signs of anything changing. No openings. No exodus. No sparse patches in the thicket of the dead. They moved, yes, but the damned things seemed packed so tightly that they never really got anywhere. Just pressed into each other and sort of bobbed around in place. A low impact workout routine of some kind, perhaps designed for the elderly, though it could work for the dead in a pinch. Sweatin’ with the zombies.
And it dawned on Lorraine more and more that there was no way out of this. Even if the rain ever fucking stopped, they were surrounded. Stuck. Trapped.
Louis chimed in again.
“Don’t you think it looks better?”
He was pleading with her now. Almost whining. And he watched her out of the side of his eye, waiting for her to react.
He wanted her to agree with him, she knew. Reassure him. Even something as small as a single nod would appease him, she figured.
But she wouldn’t give it to him. She turned her shoulders to face away from him, to look out the passenger side window, see the crowd of dead things sprawling that way, endlessly pressing into each other like they were at Ozzfest or something.
In all directions, there seemed no end to the dead. No path forward. No way out of here.
Maybe Louis thought the horde was clearing little by little — that the dead were wandering off to find food. Maybe he real
ly believed that.
But he was full of shit.
Baghead
Ripplemead, Virginia
9 years, 40 days after
After a second full night of rest, Baghead figured he was ready. Crazy what a pair of legitimate 8 or 10 hours chunks of sleep could accomplish, in an actual bed and all. Healing both mental and physical. Anyway, it was now or never, right?
The rest unclouded his mind. Sharpened his focus. Made him fully aware of where he was, who he was with. It felt wrong. He was thankful for the help, but it felt wrong to be here. With them. He needed to get gone.
He waited until the night. Apart from coming out for a couple of meals, he stayed in his room, in his bed. Resting. Napping off and on. Staring at the ceiling during the in between times. Wondering still how this would all turn out.
Life and death. That was the coin he was flipping. But maybe we all flipped it every day, whether we realized it or not. Every time we got into a car or ventured into a populated area, rubbed shoulders with all the people out there, some of whom were homicidal maniacs. He wondered about the statistics of that — had we all unwittingly interacted with a murderer at some point or another?
Then again, maybe it barely mattered. Life or death, that is. The world went careening on and on with or without any one of us, didn’t it?
He let it get late, let it get dark, let the night descend, blossom to the full extent of its powers, before he made his move. The energy of the house settled along with the night. The quiet, the stillness, something palpable he could feel in his chest, in his teeth, in his bones.
Once he was certain everyone was asleep, he threw the blankets back and moved for the door. Light on his feet. As soundless as he could manage.
No wooziness assailed him this time. No weakness that he could feel in his arms or legs. He passed through the doorway into the deeper murk of the hall, almost surprised how easily he conquered the threshold this time around. Two days ago the five foot journey to this door had felled him like a tree. Knocked him out. Left him stuck on his back. Now it was nothing.