Hearing that, Alan thought about Mike and turned to go downstairs to check on Ellen, who’d popped an Ambien or two earlier and was out like a light. Just as well. Two fresh kills in rapid succession would be too much. As he passed back into the building the others continued to debate what they’d just witnessed.
“Too much excitement for one day,” he said to himself.
As he let himself back into Ellen’s apartment, Eddie and Dave tore out of theirs and Alan was grateful, at least, to have avoided them.
8
Alan stared across the queen-size mattress at Ellen, who slept peacefully. He didn’t know how to feel. When he’d come back in, through her Ambien-induced haze she’d burbled something dreamily at him, and before he knew it they’d been a tangle of naked limbs. Mike had died a scant few hours earlier. Died was the least of it. That made it seem peaceful—in their current predicament almost enviable. He’d been devoured, and here Alan lay, in Mike’s bed, perhaps even on Mike’s side—chances were that Ellen snoozed in her normal spot, so Alan was occupying a dead man’s very personal real estate. Talk about fate tossing him a live grenade.
Ellen’s body, even dissipated, still held attraction for Alan. Okay, it was a sort of hot emaciated-supermodel Buchenwald kind of sexiness, but she still had that certain indefinable something that put lead in Alan’s pencil. Thinking of pencils, Alan grabbed one and a scratch pad and began to sketch her.
Gone were the pleasing soft curves, but if he could get into an Egon Schiele state of mind he could do some good work. Some people found Schiele’s work erotic. Alan didn’t happen to be one of them, but one must adapt to the here and now. Ellen’s areolas and nipples were dusky, almost burgundy, in sharp contrast to her pale skin. Her wasted breasts pooled on her chest, flattened empty sacs, yet he’d sucked on them like they dispensed the antidote. Unlike the others, Ellen steered clear of the roof and had gotten paler and paler in the weeks past. The triangular patch of black pubic hair stood out in sharp relief against her ashy skin, thick and matted with sweat and the commingled fluids of their lovemaking.
It didn’t feel like love. It had felt desperate, rapacious, panic stricken, violent. It had also been the first pleasurable expenditure of energy Alan could remember since everything turned rotten. Even with their bones grinding together it was the fulfillment of a bygone wet dream. Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he ’live, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread, Alan remembered from childhood. What the hell kind of fucked-up thing is that to teach a kid? Grind his bones to make my bread? What kind of bread is that? And now the things out there wanted to do the same basic thing, only skip the carbs. We’ll just eat you alive, thanks all the same.
Alan’s drawing was not turning out the way he wanted. Ellen looked twisted and knotty, her contours convex where they oughtn’t be, concave likewise. Her tangle of brunette curls a greasy amorphous blob, obscuring her face save for one closed eyelid tinted dark as a shiner. She looked as if she’d been elongated on the rack like some accused heretic during the Inquisition. His pencil said Ticonderoga but it might as well have read Torquemada by the way it rendered Alan’s fluky new girlfriend. The First Grand Inquisitor of Spain would have been proud to reduce a human being to Ellen’s pitiful status—all in a day’s work in the name of the Lord. The problem with the drawing was that it was perfect. It looked just like her.
Ellen didn’t need to see this. Alan crumpled the drawing and tossed it out the window, where it landed right on the blood-smeared spot on which Mike had met his fate. What would Goya do? Alan wondered. The phrase reminded Alan of those WWJD bumper stickers and T-shirts and friendship bracelets and whatever else they emblazoned that catchphrase on. What Would Jesus Do? Well, from the looks of things, he’d abandon his precious flock and let them rot. Good thing Alan didn’t believe in that nonsense or he’d be pretty disenchanted with the Almighty.
Back to Goya and an artist’s duty. Though he did plenty of pretty canvases, ol’ Francisco didn’t shy away from capturing ugliness. Alan thought of Goya’s painting, Saturn Devouring One of his Sons. In it, the mythological giant grips the partially dismembered naked body of one of his sons, the giant’s eyes insane with paranoia and perhaps a tinge of grief as he gnaws off his progeny’s head. Alan had plenty of firsthand experience seeing bodies being dismembered—and documenting them. In his apartment he had several walls covered top to bottom with drawings and paintings he’d done of the mob outside, both individual and group studies. He was the Audubon of the undead—keeper of the visual record of humanity’s demise.
But for whom?
Who would look at these renderings? The likelihood of future generations was pretty much nil. Time travelers? Space aliens? No, this was art for art’s sake. Like the need to breathe and eat, Alan had discovered he was predisposed to do art. He’d always wondered how pure his drive was. Did he merely create in order to impress others? He’d mostly done work for print. Now there was no audience. For a while he thought he’d only do art if there were remuneration upon completion. What a price to pay to confirm one’s dedication. His apartment was a gallery devoted to but a single theme: THE END. Pencil drawings, pastels, pen and ink, a few water-colors, which strictly speaking weren’t done with water. Not with their water shortage. He used urine, which worked out fine. The yellow pigment added authenticity to the subject matter. At least he could work in oils. Plus, the thinner got him a bit high.
So art still had its little dividends.
And he’d bagged the model of his dreams.
Who now stirred.
“Mmmmm,” she purred. “Hello.”
Speaking of high, Ellen looked a trifle baked. He wondered how many Ambiens had she’d taken, then choked back the notion that she’d maybe tried to join Mike. Her eyes swam in their hollows, unfocused. As she blinked herself back to cognizance she looked confused, rabbity.
“You’re not Mike. What are you doing here?” Her query was accusatory. She shook her head, attempting to reengage her brain. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Mike’s dead. Mike’s dead now. Alan. I’m sorry.” She attempted a smile, but her mouth made the wrong shape. “What a day, huh?” A failed attempt at mirth employing the frowsy cadence of a secretary at the water cooler.
“Yeah,” Alan mumbled.
“What’s that smell?” she said, wrinkling her nose.
“Uh, a fire outside. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“A fire?” she repeated, eyes still glassy.
“Yeah. It’ll keep.”
Ellen eased closer to Alan on the rumpled bedclothes and pressed her head against his bare chest. She draped her arms around him. He yearned for his monastic apartment.
“So,” she whispered, “are you moving in or not?”
An entreaty.
An invitation.
A trap.
______
With the pretext of needing some things from his pad, Alan disengaged from Ellen and fled her constricting lair. With nimble assurances he edged out into the common hall and left her standing in her kitchen. At the cessation of the multiple clicks of her dead bolts engaging, the door across the hall swung open and there stood Eddie, looking wry and malevolent with a fishing rod in his hand.
“You don’t waste any time, do you?” he leered. “Y’know, I always figured you for queer, but I doff my lid to you, Zotz. You got right in there like a champ and got the booty. Hats off, bud.”
“What are you . . . ?”
“Don’t play dumb, champ.” Waggling the fishing rod to make his point, Eddie held up Alan’s smoothed-out crumpled drawing of Ellen. “I did a little fishing in Lake Swenson.” He turned the drawing over, its back flecked with bloodstains.
Alan stared at his handiwork in disbelief. “With everything going on outside you rescued that drawing from the alley? Are you fucking insane?”
“Car crashes are a dime a dozen,” Eddie said, grinning, “but art is forever.”
“Car crashes are a dime a—” Alan s
hook his head like a wet dog trying to make sense of that statement. “What? Name the last time you saw a car driving by.”
“Been ages. But it didn’t do us any good, did it? Anyway, other sounds were of more interest. Ellen never moaned like that with Mikey boy, I can tell you. Even back in the day.”
Alan shoved Eddie into his apartment and closed the door behind them.
“Jesus Christ, Eddie. She might hear you,” Alan said, jabbing his finger into Eddie’s ditchlike sternum.
“Everyone hears everyone, Casanova. Sound travels. Especially when you’re bangin’ a screamer. She was making so much noise I thought she was gettin’ eaten alive. I guess maybe she was, actually.” Eddie smirked. With a plastic magnetic banana he affixed the drawing to his refrigerator door, admiring it. “Not like the old days, though, huh? Back in the day Ellen had some boasty titties. Well, you make do with what you’ve got, right? Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good enough.”
“Look, don’t make a big thing of this, okay?” Alan said, hating the vaguely inveigling tone in his voice. “Ellen has enough on her plate. . . .”
“None of us have enough on our plates,” Eddie interrupted.
“I meant figuratively. Jesus. Anyway, this is just a temporary thing. I’m just trying to . . .”
“Get your dick wet. I understand. Dude, if there’s anyone in the building who’s on your wavelength it’s yours truly. That sensitive artist shit worked its hoodoo. I get it. Some chicks dig jocks, some dig nerds. I should’ve known Ellen was a nerd whore. Just look no further than the late Mikey Swenson. What was his racket? Computers?”
Mike had worked in the IT department at an investment brokerage down on Wall Street, so point to the observant jock.
“Look, just keep it on the DL, all right? Let the woman grieve in peace.”
Eddie sniggered. “Okay. On one condition.”
Alan sagged. “Name it.”
“Keep the nudie art comin’. I want you to keep me supplied with fresh whacking material. I don’t know why I didn’t think to tap you sooner, what with all other resources being nonexistent. Not like I can log onto Bang Bus any more.”
“You want me to do porno art of Ellen for you?” Alan gaped.
“Not just Ellen. And not the way she looks now. I’ll come up with some scenarios for you to do up for me. Okay? Okay. Now get the fuck outta my apartment.”
Alan traipsed downstairs and fell onto his bed in a daze. This was what prison must be like. Alan had always wondered if he could endure incarceration—especially long term. He figured his only survival skill would be doing pervy fantasy art for the other inmates. The rapists would want rape fantasies. The murderers would want murder fantasies. The hyphenates would want hybridized fantasies, one from column A, three from column B, and so on. And now a blackmailing ex-jock was leaning on Alan for post-apocalyptic pinups.
What would Vargas do?
9
April, Then
“She’s turning blue, Mike. She’s turning fucking blue! You have to do something!”
“What am I supposed to do, Ellie? What? Go to the Duane Reade? Call a doctor?”
Ellen held Emily, barely a year old, and watched her tiny mouth open and close like a fish out of water. She’d wrung every drop of nutrition from her mother and the coffers were nearly bare. Ellen hated rationing, but what else was there to do? Mike was right, what could he do? Go out there? Sure, only to never return. Baby in tow, she tromped over to the front windows and radiated hatred at the undead things in the street below, milling about as ever, even in the freezing rain. She threw open the sash and leaned out, sleet stinging her face. She shielded Emily, pressing the small head against her depleted bosom.
“Fuck you all!” Ellen shrieked. “Fuck each and every one of you goddamned parasitic motherfuckers!”
Emily started to cry.
“What are you doing?” Mike bleated as he hastened to the window, grabbing his wife’s arm. “You could drop her.”
“And what, Mike? What? She’d be taken days before her time? Maybe I’d be doing her a favor. Look at this fucking world we’ve got here. And look at this family. A balls-less dad and a worthless mom with sand in her tits. She’s gonna fucking starve, Mike. Starve. So will we, ultimately, but Emily’s got no reserves. She’s wasting away. And blue.”
“ ‘Balls-less’?” her husband peeped.
“That’s what you got from all that? Brilliant.”
Over the prickly clatter of sleet the zombies heard the commotion above and stared up at the scene of domestic turmoil, hunger being the only urge left to animate their lifeless eyes. Ellen looked away from Mike back at the throng. She could win this bunch over in a second if she’d just fling herself and the petite hors d’oeuvre in the organic-cotton sling down to them. The lunch crowd would go wild, then move on. She remembered how the world had gaped in stupefaction and revulsion as Michael Jackson dangled his infant son out a hotel window. The multitude below, with their caved-in faces and bleached skin, reminded her of Wacko Jacko, but she was the one dangling the baby.
She slumped against the wall beneath the window and joined Emily in tears. Mike closed the sash and crouched down to comfort his girls, but his touch and gentle tone brought none. They were disconsolate and he was, truth be told, balls-less. But who wouldn’t be? Was it balls-less or just common sense to not leave the building? How could he? Ellen and Emily’s wailing grew louder, amplified by Mike’s sense of worthlessness. He rose and left the room to get some water for Ellen, but by the time he reached the kitchen, forgot his reason for being there, opened the front door and stepped into the common hall, his own expression as absent as those normally worn by the zombies.
“Quite a racket they’re raising,” Abe said, gesturing into the door, which hung ajar.
“Huh?” Mike said, his thoughts muddled. He blinked and focused on his neighbors, Abe and Paolo, the good-looking South American from 2B. “Oh, yes. Rough day.”
“Aren’t they all?” Abe said, earning earnest nods from both younger men.
“Indeed,” Paolo added. “These are dark days.”
Feeling the need to talk to people who presumably wouldn’t scream at him, Mike joined in, though he wasn’t feeling very conversational. “They’re hungry, Ellen and the baby. Hungry and tired. And frustrated. Ellen wanted me to go out and get supplies, but that’s not going to happen.”
“And that, my friend, is the difference between your generation and mine,” Abe scoffed. “If I had a starving child you can bet your last goddamn cent I’d be out the door trying to provide for her, damn the consequences.”
“Easy for you to say—,” Mike started, but Abe cut him off.
“Damn right it’s easy for me to say. As I recall you were home when this all began. Me, I hadda schlep all the way from the garment district to get home. I braved all kinds of madness to get home to my frightened little wifey. Granted, if I’d had some foresight I’d have stopped at the grocers before coming in, but hind-sight’s twenty-twenty.”
“It was different then,” Mike stammered. He’d really thought other men would commiserate with him over female troubles; bad to worse.
“Different! Feh. There were those lousy zombies all over then and they’re all over now. What, you think they weren’t chowing down on everyone in sight that day? Eighty-three years of age, I managed to get myself home intact. If any of you young men—,” the word curdled in Abe’s mouth, “—had any cojones you’d go out and do what I did. Show the same resourcefulness and—”
Mike was tiring of having his gonads impugned and was about to protest—albeit weakly—when Paolo chimed in, his machismo also under attack.
“I have the cojones, Abraham,” Paolo spat, pique scoring his rugged features.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You challenge me? You saying I don’t have the cojones of an old man?”
Abe chuckled. “I sure as hell hope you don’t have a pair like mine.”
Pa
olo’s expression softened as Abe winked at him.
“These are dark days,” Paolo repeated, a bitter smile sneaking past his anger onto his lips.
“Amen,” Abe agreed. The sound of the crying, which hadn’t abated, brought the three men back to the matter at hand. “Regardless—and I don’t want to get into a shouting match—but the fact remains that there is a woman and a child who need sustenance and it’s a man’s job to provide.”
Mike’s face flushed. Sitting at computer consoles for the last decade hadn’t exactly toughened him up or primed him for hunter-gatherer mode. Men of Abe’s generation were built differently. They were shaped and hardened by war. Abe was a vet of World War II. Mike’s only combat experience involved button mashing on a game controller. Countless hours spent on World of Warcraft and Call of Duty didn’t count. He nudged the door open an inch to look in on Ellie and Em. Though the volume had decreased, both were in a bad way. And Ellie had said Em was blue and meant it literally. The apartment could be warmer and even though they were all wearing layers, they were cold in the damp chill.
“That baby needs to eat,” Paolo said, voice steely.
“I know, I know,” Mike replied, eyeing his shoes.
“If you are not enough a man to go, I will.”
“Now wait a minute—”
“Abraham is right,” Paolo said, in his formal, mild accent. “He is an old man and he made it here. He’s told us many, many, many times of his perilous journey. We were lucky, you and I and some of the others, to be here already, but he and John came late. And they suffered.”
Mike was about to assert that they’d all suffered, but point taken. Abe had walked the walk. As an old man was wont to do, he’d recounted his trek often—maybe even embellished a little—but scrawny old Abe Fogelhut had bested all the “young bucks.”
“My gear is down in the locker,” Abe said, but Paolo waved him off.
“I do not need hand-me-downs, señor.”
Paolo about-faced and trundled down to his apartment.
Pariah Page 6