Apocalypticon

by Clayton Smith

  “You stole a jersey?”

  “Well he wasn’t wearing it!” Patrick hissed. “It was in the locker room. I think if he wanted it, he would’ve stopped by the stadium at some point in the last three years!”

  “No wonder you were gone so long. What else did you take?”

  “Nothing!” Patrick cried. He crossed his arms and rolled over, facing away from his bunkmates. He clutched his bag angrily and shoved it under his head, punching it with his ear to dig a comfortable divot among the supplies inside. “That jersey is extremely important to me, Ben Fogelvee, and if Ditzy Darla drools on his uniform, you’re paying with your kidneys.”

  •

  Patrick awoke to the cold, hard slap of steel across his face. “Wake up.”

  “Ow!” he cried, rubbing his cheek. A long, wide welt had instantly started forming. “What’s the matter with you?” He looked up and saw a tall, thin African-American man standing over him with Patrick’s machete in hand.

  “Wake up,” the man said again.

  “I’m awake! Cripes. Give me back my machete.”

  “No.”

  Patrick sat up. The blankets had been tossed back from the boat, and Ben and Lucy were already awake. They were being secured by more newcomers, their arms pinned sharply behind their backs. There were six assailants in all, and each one of them held at least one of Patrick’s and Ben’s weapons. Note to self, Patrick thought miserably. Hide weapons while sleeping.

  “You come with me,” the man with Patrick’s machete said. “Madame Siquo is expecting you.”

  Patrick shook his head, trying to wake up his brain. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “No,” the man said again. “You are Mouse Hunter.” His voice was surprisingly deep, especially for how thin and frail he looked. He wore a gray knit cap with a long tassel and an olive green vest with no shirt underneath, despite the chill in the air. He was skinny, but lean and ropy, and therefore much more than a physical match for Patrick, who was skinny, and just skinny. Plus, the man had the machete. And Patrick seemed to have misplaced his hammer in his sleep.

  “I’m the what?” he asked, wiping his bleary eyes.

  “Mouse Hunter,” one of the other men piped up.

  “Mouse Hunter,” they all agreed, bobbing their heads.

  “You are Mouse Hunter. Madame Siquo waits.”

  “There’s been a misunderstanding, here. I’m not Mouse Hunter. I would never hunt mice. I’m scared to death of ‘em. Ben, tell him.”

  “It’s true,” Ben admitted. “He’s a pansy.”

  “A pansy,” Patrick confirmed. “See? Sorry for the confusion. If I could just—“ He moved to take the machete from the thin man. The man slapped his hand with the flat blade.

  “Madame Siquo says you come with us, or I cut off your head.” He placed the sharp end of the blade against Patrick’s neck.

  “Ah...I think I should discuss this with Madame Siquo in person,” he said, gingerly pushing the blade away from his windpipe. “Not because you threatened me, mind you. But because I want to, for the sake of diplomacy.” The man grunted and stood back, allowing Patrick to climb out of the boat. His right leg had fallen asleep, and he stumbled on his way over the side, crashing face-first into the dead grass. He wanted to stay down on the ground and die. This was just the most humiliating morning of his life.

  The tall man grabbed him by the arms and lifted him easily to his feet. Yes, I shan’t be challenging this man’s strength, thought Patrick, who could barely heft his own backpack. “What about the boat?” he asked. “Who’s staying with the boat?”

  “All will stay. You and I will go alone.”

  “Oh good. A blind date from the Eighth Circle of Hell.” He shot Ben a pleading look that said, Get me out of this, but Ben only shrugged and motioned with his eyes toward the men and their weapons. “I was right,” Patrick said, glaring. “You, sir, are no Batman.”

  The thin man led him silently across the park and up the hill to Riverside Drive. They turned left and stalked along the quiet road. The fog was still thin, allowing a better panoramic than Patrick had seen in months. It was just a pity that all there was to see was Memphis.

  He’d been to Memphis a handful of times in his life, and it seemed like every time he visited, the town was just a little worse -- a little poorer, a little more rundown, a little less appealing. The M-Day catalyst had sped up this devolutionary process exponentially, and now the home of blues and rock ‘n’ roll was little more than a burned out pile of building-sized litter. Everywhere he looked, windows were broken out and boarded up. Some buildings had fallen over, covering the streets with bricks and sheet tin for blocks. Broken glass crunched underfoot at every step. Trash fires burned in barrels, some unmanned, others warming crude derelicts with long, dirt-matted hair and ripped clothes stained with their own waste.

  All in all, it was pretty much the Memphis he remembered. Just more so.

  They turned right onto Beale Street and had to climb over a pile-up of rusty clunkers stacked nearly as high as the railroad bridge overhead. In a dusty field to the right, a gang of teenagers took batting practice at a line of broken bottles and the occasional ambler-by. They scattered when they saw the thin man trudging up the street.

  “I must be pretty intimidating,” Patrick said.

  “They know I walk with Madame Siquo. They respect her power.”

  “Seems a little more like fear,” Patrick observed.

  The thin man nodded his gaunt head. “They are the same.”

  Patrick sighed. He was really not looking forward to this meeting.

  A few blocks down, they passed the Orpheum. Its fire escape had been torn from the brick wall and now lay dead in the street. They climbed over the rusty brown staircase, avoiding sharp corners and thick bolts. “I saw The Pixies here once,” Patrick mused aloud. “The bassist fell off the stage and gave some girl a concussion.”

  “It is home to Reverend Wharton’s congregation now.”

  “Oh. Baptists?”

  “Satanists.”

  Patrick shrugged. “Same thing.”

  They reached 2nd Street, the western edge of the Beale Strip, which was hilariously still cordoned off from vehicular traffic with broken and battered plastic white barriers. Surprisingly, fewer fires burned along the street beyond 2nd, and the occasional passerby became more and more rare. Either the darkened lights and the missing music made this a dead zone to those who remembered its heyday, or else the Strip was still what it had always been, a hovel for tourists to be largely avoided by the locals.

  Patrick noted with sadness the dead and broken neon lining the street. Beale had once been so alive with color and light, even when the rest of the city cowered in the darkness and gloom of poverty. Now, most of the neon signs had been smashed, their glass tubes paving the street in tiny shards. The sign for B.B. King’s had half broken off its brick building and hung ominously over the street at a 45 degree angle. The skull of Tater Red’s leered darkly beneath his top hat. The brick and plaster guts of Beale Street Tap Room were blown across the middle of the street, apparently expelled from the old brick building by way of some explosive or other. The entire Strange Cargo building tilted precariously over the hole left by the explosion.

  The thin man led Patrick up over the loose mound of bricks in the road. Pat nearly stumbled on a twisted bar stool but caught himself by grabbing a doorframe jutting up from the brown brick mess. He slid down the other side and followed the man to the entrance of Pig. Up above, the large, round sign of a flexing hog was mostly intact, as was a plywood board next to the entrance that read, “BIG ASS BEER TO GO.” Most of Pig’s windows were boarded up, but one of the doors was accessible and even retained unbroken plates of glass in its metal frame. A bald, muscular man in jeans and a tight black sweater sat on
a stool outside of the door. He stood when he saw Patrick and the thin man approach. “Mouse Hunter?” he asked. The thin man nodded. The guard opened the door and ushered them in.

  Another guard sat just off to the left, picking at his fingernails with a rusty nail. Patrick nodded politely. The guard spat a stream of thick, brown juice onto the floor.

  “You wait here,” the thin man said. He disappeared behind a curtain in the back of the room.

  Patrick looked around. The windows were all blocked up, and candles provided the only light, but there were enough of them scattered around the room to see. Most of the restaurant was still in good shape, all things considered. The floor was grimy with years of grease and tread, but most of the black linoleum tiles remained, and the bare, scored concrete was only visible through a handful of squares. The tables and chairs had been pushed up against the northern wall as a barricade against the boarded windows and second entrance, leaving the majority of the seating area completely open. Posters and tin signs still hung on the walls, showing the rich history of Memphis and teasing the viewer with yellowing photographs of steaming barbecue.

  The curtain rustled, and the thin man reappeared. “Madame is ready for you,” he said, gesturing beyond the curtain. Patrick took a deep breath. What the hell, he thought. Memphis is as depressing a place to die as any.

  He stepped through the curtain. The thin man let it fall behind him, cutting him off from the main room. Patrick climbed three rickety stairs to a raised platform that might have served as a stage at one time. Now it was a sitting area; four mismatched chairs surrounded a small, round, wooden table. In the furthest chair from the stairs, a high-backed piece of furniture with red velvet upholstery, sat an old woman. Thick ropes of hair the color and consistency of steel wool draped down her back and around her long, oval face. Her skin was the color of burned wood. She had sharp, bony features, weathered and hardened with age. A trio of candles burned low on the table, their dim light reflecting off the woman’s milky white eyes.

  “Welcome, Mouse Hunter,” she said in a voice as dry as sand. She gestured to the armchair opposite her own. Patrick sank cautiously into it. He was almost certain the woman was blind, yet she seemed to be following him with her chalky white eyes.

  “About that,” he said. “I think you have me confused with someone else. I’m not exactly what you’d call the hunting type. More of the casually observing type. With intermittent color commentary.”

  The old woman reached into the folds of her dress and retrieved a shallow clay cooking pot covered with a lid. She shook the pot roughly. Something inside rattled like dice. “You do not seek truth. But truth has sought you out.” She opened the lid and set it on the edge of the table. Then, taking the pot with both hands, she quickly flipped it upside-down. “The bones foretold your coming, Mouse Hunter. I am the channel of that which has found you.” She pulled the pot away and revealed a pile of off-white pork rib bones, boiled clean of their gristle. Without taking her dead eyes from Patrick’s, she felt about the pile with her gnarled hands, brushing her fingertips lightly along the edges, reading their positions. “Do you know why you are here?”

  “Because black Skeletor brought me?” Patrick tried.

  “Marimbo is Fate’s escort,” the old woman whispered, waving her gnarled old hands over the bones. “Our paths have converged; you have come to this place to learn the truth.”

  Patrick furrowed his brow. “I don’t really know what you’re talking about, ma’am. I’d really like to get back to my friend and move on.”

  “What is it you seek?” the woman asked.

  “Disney World, mostly.”

  “Yes. You hunt the mouse. The mouse, you will find.” Patrick shifted uneasily in his chair. The old woman began to chant over the bones in a language he didn’t understand, which meant it was neither English nor very poor German. With a quickness belying her age, she plucked a bone from the top of the pile and held it high. “Your path is broken by peril. The light bringer.” She laid the bone down in the center of the table. She plucked a second and held it aloft. “The running man.” She laid this bone parallel to the first, then drew a third. “The butcher. The mummer. The demon’s daughter. The siren. The fire drinker.” She laid each new peril in line with the others. Then she took two bones from the pile, one in each hand. Her breath came shallow and quick, and her hands began to shake. Lines of worry creased her temples. “Ubasti Tom and the hollow man.” She lay these two bones with the others and presented them to Patrick. “Your path lies broken. The bulldog is the mortar, the mouse hunter, the trowel.” She scooped the bones and cupped them in her hands. She held them out to Patrick. “All may be, or none may be, or one may be. Choose.”

  Patrick raised an eyebrow. He had no idea what in God’s name was going on. “You want me to...choose a bone?” he asked uneasily.

  “All may be, or none may be, or one may be,” she repeated. “Choose, Mouse Hunter.”

  He leaned forward cautiously. “This doesn’t seem very sanitary,” he muttered. He reached into her hands and picked up a bone, but when he touched it, he must have caught a jagged corner, because he felt a sharp sting in his finger. He cried out and yanked his hand back. The middle finger dripped a trail of blood across the table. He sucked the finger dry and shook out his hand. He was about to say something about third-world swine infections when he noticed something strange. The entire pile of bones in the old woman’s hands was drenched in blood. It had only been a quick prick to the finger, but the bones dripped red, and the blood poured through the old woman’s fingers.

  Her brow furrowed, and when she spoke, her voice was sharp as glass. “All are chosen.”

  Patrick started. “What do you mean, all are chosen? All aren’t chosen! I didn’t choose all!”

  “All are chosen,” she repeated. “You do not seek truth, but truth has sought you out. You do not seek peril, but peril will find you.” She placed the bones back in the clay pot and covered them with the lid. Then she stood up slowly and walked around the table to where Patrick sat. He instinctively leaned away from her. She caught his hands in her own. He tried to pull away, but she was surprisingly strong. When he looked into her eyes, he saw milky white tears running down her cheeks. “You chose all and so must choose again,“ she whispered. “The bulldog or the mouse hunter must fall. You will choose.”

  Something flipped in Patrick’s stomach. Her hands were wet and warm with blood, but he couldn’t pry away. Her words seemed to echo around his skull. “What do you mean?” he asked, suddenly desperate. “What does that mean? The bulldog or the mouse hunter, who’s the bulldog?”

  “The bulldog is the mortar. Mouse Hunter is the trowel. Without the bulldog, the mouse hunter is powerless.”

  “What, you mean Ben? Is Ben the bulldog?”

  “The bulldog or the mouse hunter will fall. You will choose, but you will not know the choice.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Patrick cried, panicked. “Please, let me go!”

  She pushed her face to within centimeters of his own. He could feel her hot breath on his cheek. Her tears dried, and her voice became brittle once more. “The light bringer. The running man. The butcher. The mummer. The demon’s daughter. The siren. The fire drinker. Ubasti Tom. The hollow man. Perils, all, and one must fall. Do not forget.” A stale wind rushed into the room and whipped out the candle flames. The stage plunged into total darkness. Then the curtain parted, and the thin man stood in the opening. Orange candlelight filtered into the darkness. The old woman was gone.

  The thin man beckoned. “You have upset Madame Siquo. You must go.”

  •

  “So wait. Why pudding?”

  Ben shrugged. “Something to do with his kid, I think. It was her favorite food.”

  “Oh, he had a daughter?” Lucy asked, her eyes wide with intrigue. “What happen
ed to her?”

  “The same thing that happened to everyone. She just...you know...melted.”

  “Oh my gosh, that is so sad. So he ate pudding in, like, her memory?”

  “Well, it sounds kind of stupid when you put it like that. I don’t know. All I’m saying is, he worked it out so he had exactly one Snack Pack for each day’s worth of his food. So he ate a pudding every day, and when he ran out of pudding, he ran out of food.”

  “So why didn’t he...you know...get more?”

  “There were no more Snack Packs,” Ben said. “Trust me. He looked.”

  “No, why didn’t he get more food?”

  “Because there were no more Snack Packs.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “I know you are,” he said, patting her shoulder.

  Lucy sat back against the boat, biting her top lip. “That is so weird.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Did he have a wife? What happened to her?”

  “Yeah, Annie. We all went to college together.”

  “Did she melt too?” Lucy asked, her lip quivering.

  “No,” Ben said, his face falling with the memory. “She got pinned between a couple of SUVs.”

  “Oh my gosh,” Lucy said, covering her mouth with both hands.

  “She was a teacher. When the bombs started falling, I guess the kids in her class started melting, so she called Patrick. He was at work across town. There was just mass chaos, and Pat told her to stay there, but she wanted to go to the day care and find Izzy. She ran out into the parking lot, and some driver had liquefied at the wheel. His car went careening over the bushes and smashed Annie into the hood of another one. I guess it was going fast, it--well, Patrick eventually made it across town, hours later, and she was still there, and I guess--I guess half of her was caught, and the other half...it was...well...it wasn’t.” Tears streamed down Lucy’s face. She rubbed frantically at her cheeks.