by J. B. Beatty
“Do you have any books on vampires?” she asks.
“Ummm. I probably could download some. Still pursuing your vampire analogy?”
“I’m just curious. He’s been putting your blood in me day and night for weeks. I can practically taste you. You know, in fact, I did. Yesterday I bit the inside of my cheek while I was trying to eat. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that’s Arvy’s blood!’ ”
“That is so… absolutely disconcerting.”
“Tell me about it. And so I am completely full of your blood. I probably have more of your blood than I do of mine. And I’m feeling stronger all the time. This is crazy. Justin is a genius witch doctor.”
“You know he’s just making stuff up as he goes along, right? He has no idea what he’s doing unless he can find a YouTube video on it.”
“Whatever works. But at this point I’m thinking we could just cut him out of the process and I could bite your neck occasionally. I could suck out what I need. Maybe you could use a file to sharpen my teeth.”
“In another context, another place, another time, that could sound sexy.”
“You wish.”
Before long, Maggie is on her feet again. She wants to know what we’ve planned for the Spring Offensive, as we are now calling it.
Carrie points out that ‘Spring Offensive” implies that we have numbers far greater than we have, and that we could actually do damage to the other side in any noticeable way.
“Who cares? I’m going with it,” says Maggie.
We run through what plans we have come up with. “I don’t want to help make the bomb,” she says. “I like working with tools sometimes, but the whole idea of me screwing up and exploding us all kind of takes all the fucking fun out of it.”
“Okay,” I say. “You’re off the bomb squad.”
“But,” she says, her eyes finally showing excitement again. “If we capture one of those men in black, I want to be on the torture squad.”
“Oh. We haven’t actually talked about torture.”
Justin looks up: “We’re not ruling anything out.”
Carrie seems deep in thought, eyebrows furrowed.
25→WELL INTO THE WINTER NOW
We check the weather every day online. There’s no telling how long the Internet is even going to last for us. For now, though, it’s all we have. It saves us from having to open the hatch every day and stick a finger out. Anytime we lift that lid, we risk everything. The idea of mounting a camera out there so we could monitor the area never panned out. Couldn’t get the signal through all the dirt we live under without a hard-wired connection. Impossible for us.
Though it’s a mild February (Carrie: “the world has ended but we’ve still got global warming going for us”), this is still northern Michigan. We’ve probably got 18 inches of snow on top of that hatch.
Sometime in March, winter’s grip will probably loosen. And then we’re going to roll.
Maggie’s feeling much better, which means her feistiness level has been shooting up. The tension between her and Carrie has been increasing; there’s not a real reason. I think it’s just a personality clash: two alpha females in a confined space.
Carrie has no use at all anymore for Justin. And with me she’s off and on. Usually off.
It’s getting to the point where we’d much rather risk our lives on the outside than coexist on the inside.
“Does this look too butch?”
I glance up. Maggie is holding a brush pointed at her hair, which is growing out a bit.
“By ‘butch,’ what exactly do you mean?”
“Do you have to have everything explained to you?”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, does this look cute? Or do I look like a boy?”
“In fairness, I don’t think you could ever look like a boy.”
“We’re talking about the hair here.”
“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “I’m not an expert on girls’ hairstyles.”
“Have you ever found yourself attracted to girls with short hair?”
“No.” I answer too quickly. And too honestly. I realize that right away.
“Dammit!” She stalks out of my room.
I step to the doorway and go into salvage mode: “It’s not about what works for me,” I say. “I think it should be about whatever makes you feel good.”
She waves goodbye with her middle finger.
Another time, this:
Justin’s eating Pop-Tarts for lunch at the table in our kitchen.
“You’re going to be the one responsible for wiping out our supply of toaster pastries this winter,” I say as I walk in. “You’ve eaten way more than your share.”
“Want one?” he says as I sit down.
“God no.” I watch him eat and eventually we have a rambling conversation about nothing in particular. Then Carrie walks in, sweatshirt, hair in ponytail, doesn’t look at us, looks in the fridge, comes up with a bagel and pries it apart before inserting it in the toaster. She pulls out a chair that’s far enough away that to signal that she doesn’t want to join our conversation, but it’s close enough that we can’t comfortably ignore her. Justin looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
The conversation winnows away. The bagel pops up from the toaster. She takes it, unbuttered, and sits down. Looks at us if it’s a challenge.
“Hey,” we all say quietly in a gruntlike fashion.
I drum my fingers on the table for a second or two. “Still working on ‘Downton Abbey’?” I ask Justin.
“Yeah,” he says. “I keep falling asleep and losing my stopping point.”
“Huh,” I respond.
I hear footsteps and then Maggie’s voice. “Yo,” she says cheerfully as she steps into the room. The brightness leaves her face when she sees Carrie. “I was just checking,” her voice drops. She looks at the refrigerator, opens it, closes it. “Checking on that… it’s fine.” And she leaves.
Carrie never looks up but even I can feel the tension. Justin’s eyebrow rises even more. I look at my hands. Eventually Carrie finishes her bagel and leaves.
We both exhale when we hear her bedroom door close behind her.
Justin tilts his head down but sharpens his gaze on me. “Did you…?”
“What? Did I what?”
Justin leans back and glowers at me. “So this is all your fault!”
“What’s my fault?”
“You slept with Carrie! You snake!”
“Okay, I don’t know where you’re getting this. I didn’t… Okay, I did. But I don’t know where you’re getting it. And it’s not like I even had a choice. She forced herself on me.”
Justin laughs. “I’m having trouble seeing you as anything but a willing victim of harassment here. You might want to consider taking some accountability, dude.”
“It only happened once. When Maggie wasn’t doing well.”
“Oh, I see. So you only kicked her when she was down…”
“You make it sound horrible!” I say.
“No, you did. And now we’re trapped in an underground bunker and we have a war going on down here.”
“An awkward kitchen moment does not make a war,” I say. “And Maggie and I don’t really have that kind of relationship, I don’t think.”
“Says the only hetro boy in the underground. Listen, whether you like it or not, the simple dynamics of the situation here dictate that you needed to be a lot more sensitive to Maggie’s emotions.”
“That’s like asking the blind to look more closely.”
Justin smiles. “Exactly. And now you’ve got to find a way to make things right, because spring is far away, and those awkward kitchen moments are going to get a lot worse before the snow melts.”
26→HE HAD GOT SECRET NEWS
Near the end of February, the weather changed. Outside, instead of easing up, the bitter cold came back, with temperatures near zero for days. Inside, the change could be read on Justin’s face. For a few weeks he could go off nurse
duty and spend time on himself. I saw him actually reading for fun. And watching “Downton Abbey,” which I had never taken him up on. And working out in between everything. It was like he had a horrible parasite inside him that could only be killed by doing endless push-ups.
Then it all stopped, and when I looked for him he was always in Maggie’s room. Running tests, looking at the analyzer. Maggie seemed to wind down at the same time, and rather than griping about Carrie’s cooking, she lay on her bed, watching movies and napping.
I grab Justin as he walks past my room.
“How’s it going?”
He shrugs and keeps walking past.
“Justin,” I raise my voice. He stops and scratches his eyebrow. He turns to me.
“I don’t know,” he says quietly. “It’s not working anymore. You notice how her energy level is going down.”
“What do your tests say?”
He looks down the hall and steps into my room, gently shutting the door.
“The blast count is going up fast. Really fast.”
“Okay. I know what that means, but what does that really mean?”
“It means leukemia is winning.”
“What can we do?”
He shrugs in frustration. Sits on the bed. “What we did worked for a little while. It worked a little bit. But the cancer is coming back stronger than ever. Stronger than when I first tested her. And all we can do—the only tool at our disposal—is what we already did. It’s not going to work. Trying to do it all again is only going to make her weaker. It’s going to weaken whatever defenses she has left against the cancer. It will make her die quicker.”
“So that’s it,” I say quietly. “She’s definitely going to die?”
He blinks and nods without looking at me.
“When? How long do we have?”
“I don’t fucking know. For the millionth time, I’m not an oncologist. They make estimates based on what they’ve seen in the past with their other patients. I’m an untrained poser. I’ve got no idea.”
If we had windows, I’d be looking out the window. Instead I’m staring at these white walls. Maggie saved me. More than once. For starters, if it weren’t for her taking me away from my house, I would surely be dead by now.
“I owe her,” I say. “I owe her so much. What can I do?”
“You’ve already given her god knows how much blood. You’re anemic and unhealthy yourself now. You’ve got nothing more to give. No,” he pauses, “Our job is just about making her happy and making it easier for her. We’re going to play every day by ear. See what she needs and take care of it. Maybe more importantly, we’ll be seeing what she wants and doing what we can.”
Later, Carrie prods me for information. I hold out for a time, but finally say, “Justin says we’re playing it by ear. One day at a time.”
Her reaction is strangely impassive. “Yeah. It’s what we do,” she says. “We die.”
She won’t look at me.
27→I KNOWED IT WOULDN’T STAY THE WAY IT WAS
“S
he wants you,” Justin says.
“Okay…” I look up from my book. “You look thrashed. Maybe you want to get some sleep.”
“That’s exactly what I’m doing. She should be fine on pain meds for the next 4-5 hours. Wake me if something happens.” He climbs atop the bunk and is probably asleep in seconds.
I go down the hall, feeling the bloodless fatigue that has been with me for weeks. Maggie is sitting on her bed. “Hey, I did it,” she says brightly.
“Did what?”
“Check it out.” And she fans out a bunch of small pieces of paper.
“Are those…”
“Cards. I designed them and cut them out from note paper. They’re kind of lame and floppy, but they’ll do the job.”
“Sweet.”
“Sit down. We’re playing gin rummy.”
“I don’t know how to play gin rummy.”
She gives me the same look she would give me if I said I preferred sleeping with small goats. “It’s not hard.”
“I have a one-card-game memory. I only ever remember the last game I’ve played.”
“Which was…”
“Go fish.”
“Wow. You’re kidding,” she says.
“No, I’m like that with jokes, too. I only ever remember the last joke I’ve been told. I couldn’t string together two jokes if my life depended upon it.”
“Okay then, what’s your joke?”
“Well, it’s an Irish joke. I suppose that’s racist.”
“I think everyone’s allowed to make Irish jokes. I mean, St. Patrick’s Day is open to everyone.”
“Yeah, I suppose. Okay, here goes. An Irish woman sees the priest at church and he says, ‘What’s wrong?’ And she says, ‘I’ve got terrible, horrible news. My husband passed away last night. And now I’ve got to arrange for his funeral.’ ‘Oh that is terrible, Mary,’ he says. ‘Did he have any last requests?’ She thinks for a minute and then says, ‘Only that he wanted me to put down the gun.’ ”
Maggie stares at me blankly for a moment and says, “That was horrible. Look at me. Am I laughing? I’m not even smiling.”
“It was worth at least a smirk.”
“There is no smirk happening on this face. Not with that joke. I can’t believe you have a 1-joke memory and you waste it on that.”
“It’s not something I have control of. And I never said anything about it being a good joke.”
“But that’s really all you have?”
“I’m empty now. We can play cards.”
“Yeah, Go Fish. Very excited about that. Maybe you should get on YouTube and learn how to play gin rummy and be a normal person.”
“Maybe you could just teach me.”
“No, I don’t think so. Teachers have to be patient. I don’t have time for that crap.” She looks at me oddly. “Hey,” she says.
“What?”
She looks down. “Can I talk to you about something?”
“Of course. Anything.”
“You’re probably going to regret saying ‘anything.’ Can you shut the door? And lock it. I really don’t want Carrie walking in.”
“Does she even ever come in here anymore?”
“No, but lock it. Now. Because I said.”
I do and return to the bed. “So… What’s on your mind?”
“I don’t know where to start,” she says. “It’s not like this is a prepared speech or that I can even think straight. It’s just a jumble of thoughts and I’m going to spew them out like vocabulary puke and then we’ll figure out what to do with it.”
“Nice image.”
“Thank you. Okay, well, Justin is acting weird around me. And I’m pretty sure it has to do with my tests and the fact that I’m feeling shitty again. Every time I ask him directly, he mumbles a bunch of medical talk and then changes the subject.”
“It could mean anything.”
“It means I’m dying, Sherlock. And the way I feel like I’m crashing, it’s coming up about 80 years faster than I planned.”
I touch her knee and shake my head. She pushes my hand away.
“I didn’t ask you here to make me feel better. I mean, I get it. I get what you’re all about. You are so different from the kind of guys that I always hung around with before the world ended. I think I finally get you now. You’re smart, you’re funny. You’re brave. And you would do anything in the world for me and I’ve only treated you badly.”
“No, you haven’t…”
“Shut up.” And then she returns to her speech: “You have been draining your blood just to give me a chance. I don’t know any other guys that would have ever done that. Not like you have. It’s amazing that you have any color left in your skin. You’ve got about an ounce of blood left, probably. You’re my—okay, really—you’re the best friend I have in the world. And when I die, I want to be holding your hand.”
“Please stop.”
“No. Shut up�
� What I’m trying to say is that I feel horrible because in some ways I looked down on you for so long, because I was once hot and popular. And now look at me. I’m shriveled, weak, I’ve got these amazing cheekbones all of a sudden but that’s only because I’m wasting away. My boobs are actually shrinking. And all those boys I wanted and that wanted me, none of them are here with me. It’s you who stayed by my side.”
“Ummm. In their defense, they’re all dead. You killed some of them yourself.”
“That’s not important now. What’s important is that I am thanking you for being an incredible person.”
“You’re welcome,” I say slowly.
“I’ve got one more thing I want to do. One more thing. And I want to do it with you and I want to do it for you. I’m just hoping that you’ll do it for me.”
“Ummm?”
“I want to get fucked.”
“Oh god. I almost thought that might be coming but then I told myself, no, this is not going in that direction…”
“What, are you disgusted by the thought?” She falls on the bed and covers her face. “I knew you would be. I knew I shouldn’t ask.”
“No, no, no!” I say. “I’m not disgusted. I am caught off-guard. I am overwhelmed by awkwardness. I’m just overwhelmed in general. Just let me catch my breath here.”
She keeps her face down.
“You really mean sex?”
She nods into her pillow.
“This is, well, it’s not how I fantasized about it.”
“I knew you had fantasies about me!” She sits up with an accusing glare in her eyes.
“Okay, busted, yeah. So what. But this is different. This is way different from any sex I have ever thought about. This is kind of a…”
“A pity fuck.”
“Okay, that’s a term you could use. But you’ve got it going both ways. With the speech about how you never found me attractive but now you’re going to do it with me. But also about how you’re wasting away and this is your dying wish.”
“A double pity fuck.”
“Has this even ever happened before in human history?”