by McBain, Tim
“I dreamed that we were back there,” she said. “When I was sleeping just now, I mean. I dreamed that we were sitting on the deck, and you had something cooking on the grill. I watched wisps of smoke spill out from around the edges of the lid, smelled the charred smell. We didn’t say anything. We just looked out into the woods, and it was peaceful.”
Mitch stroked his thumb over the can in his hand. It traced a line into the sweat coating the aluminum.
“That was fun,” he said. “At that house, you know. We had a good time there.”
He wanted to tell her that he had dreamed of that place, too. Not recently, but he had dreamed of it off and on through the years. In some ways maybe that was the high point of their time together, of his life. Six weeks that left a high water mark they’d never touch again. He wanted to tell her that in his dreams, he could still feel what it felt like to be young with her, when they felt all the way together, and it felt like anything was possible. He wanted to tell her, but he thought better of it.
The words describing his dreams percolated up to his tongue, but he held them back.
“We had fun there, didn’t we?” he said.
“We did.”
He wondered if the Gunderson home was really as great as it felt in his memories. Was the hot tub really so wonderful? Was that massive screen that special? Or was being young with a life of endless possibilities in front of them what they really missed? And even then, was it really like that, or was nostalgia flattering reality, making all of the colors look brighter, all of the images clearer and more pure.
The conversation trailed away to a shared moment of thoughtful silence and from there degraded into nothing. In time she fell asleep again. He watched her eyelids now, closed with a dark undertone radiating purple hues from beneath the flesh. The hot water heater rumbled a while behind him and then kicked off.
And alone in the silence he grew angry with himself. How had he gotten so soft? So unable to express himself, unable to even feel his own emotions all the way, numbing them always with TV and beers and detachment. How had he let life rush past like this? He remained sedentary as the fruit withered on the vine, as the time dried out and blew away in the wind.
One of the fluorescent bulbs began flickering above him, an uneven crackle accompanying the strobe effect. He didn’t find it unpleasant, though. It was more like a little white noise that broke up the starkness of the quiet. Janice didn’t seem to mind, either. She didn’t wake anyhow.
Disease.
Death.
Shit. How do you prepare for this? How do you brace yourself? You can’t, can you? He knew it couldn’t be all the way real until it happened, knew that he couldn’t anticipate the depth or scale of the thing, but he understood one thing: This was going to hurt so bad.
If it was real, anyway. It could all be fake after all, couldn’t it? She could be wrong. She could be.
These concerns and doubts circled in his head in an endless loop as his eyes drooped closed, and his head nestled into the chair, and he drifted into unconsciousness.
Travis
Hillsboro, Michigan
45 days after
Travis sat on the gliding swing on the front porch, rocking in silence. He was so high on oxycontin that he periodically jizzed a little bit in his boxer shorts. Not a full load of ejaculate, just a little squirt, like pre-come. He was aware of each and every spurt, intensely so, but gave no thought to changing his shorts or pants. The swing kept right on going, and the air tingled and swirled outside of him, around him, a living, spiraling thing he could breathe in. The world was bright and blurred and a little bit farther away than usual. His core was so warm, but the tip his nose was icy cold.
As the swing moved, the blue sky rose and fell in his field of vision. The houses across the street lurched up and down like boats on an angry sea.
The street was dead, as it had been for many days. Most everyone was gone in one way or another. Today, he didn’t see anyone until Sean stopped by in the afternoon. With all of the people dying and fleeing for the government camps, Sean was the only person left in the neighborhood that Travis knew. He’d been three grades ahead of Travis in school. One of those achiever types. While Travis looked for ways to spend the school day with a buzz, Sean got good grades and lettered in multiple sports. Between that and the age gap, they’d never been friends or anything, but now here they were with no one else.
Sean climbed the front steps and stood on the porch. It was September, a little chilly, but he was still wearing those Adidas sandals he always wore. Travis found this amusing but didn’t say anything.
“What up?” Sean said.
“Swingin’,” Travis said, still gliding back and forth. “How’s it going?”
“I’m good. You seen them raiders around?”
“Not in a couple of weeks. I think they got all they wanted and moved on to rape and pillage larger towns.”
He tried to look at Sean while he talked to him, but he had a hard time focusing. The blur of all things smeared right up onto his neighbor’s face, the whole world smudged and clouded like butter on the sides of a glass bowl.
They fell silent a moment, Sean turning to look out in the direction that Travis and the swing faced. The vacant house across the street wasn’t all that interesting, but they looked at it anyway.
“You haul anything good lately?” Travis said.
“Mm... Snagged about ten more propane tanks at that Shell station outside of town,” he said. “Busted the lock off of the cage by the air compressor.”
“Nice.”
“So my grill has plenty of fuel. Wish we had meat to cook,” he said. “We gotta go fishing or something, man. I need the protein.”
Travis smiled, nodded. Sean squinted at him.
“Bro, are you fucked up?” Sean said.
Travis tried to hold back a chuckle, but he couldn’t.
“Nah, man,” he said.
Sean tilted his head as if mulling this over.
“Your eyes look funny is all,” he said.
Travis chuckled again. I’m full of pills, idiot. He laughed a little harder. Yes, liquor was fine, and he liked marijuana OK, but the pills pulled heaven down inside of his brain and held it there for a while. Euphoria. Bliss. He felt untouchable.
And he closed his eyes and drifted into the blackness behind his eyelids for a moment, the warm feeling swelling up to take his consciousness for a few seconds, pulling him under. And images of blood smeared on black and white ceramic tile came to him with violent intensity like they were being burned into his imagination. He heard whimpering so shrill and pathetic.
His head bobbed back up, shaking off the nightmare. He was scared for a second, but then he felt the warmth, felt heaven inside of him once more.
Sean just stared at him.
“I’m sorry. Did you say something?” Travis said.
“No. I didn’t say anything.”
He turned to face the street, and the two of them watched the empty neighborhood again. Eventually, Sean said goodbye and wandered off, but Travis stayed out there for a long time. The swing lurched back and forth, and he smiled, and a little more jizz spurted onto the semen already crusted to his boxer shorts.
In the evening, Travis felt itchy. A mess of tingles piled on his skin and crawled all over each other like snakes. He sat in the living room, candlelight flickering on the walls around him again. He rubbed another oxy in a wet paper towel, his fingers and thumb shifting the soggy paper back and forth over the tiny pill. This process removed the time release coating that ensured the medication would be doled out slowly over a period of 24 hours. Instead, eating this uncoated tablet would deliver the full dose at once. Crushing and snorting it would put all of it in his bloodstream within seconds.
Decisions, decisions.
This wasn’t part of the plan. He was supposed to follow a strict regimen of rationing, and it certainly didn’t involve snorting. Discipline. Following the rules. That’s how the ro
tation worked. But maybe his sense of dosage was wrong. All of this pill stuff was new. He would need to dial things in, right?
The coating removed, he set the pill aside and lit a cigarette. Camel Lights today. His favorite. Smoke swirled off of the end of the cig, and his thoughts swirled as well. He felt guilty. He was already breaking the regimen on day one? That didn’t bode well. He was set for a long time, a few years. Running out of pills and booze any faster than necessary would be a nightmare. And from the more dramatic angle, he had enough intoxicants on hand to kill himself many times over if he were reckless. He didn’t figure this to be a real risk. He wasn’t gluttonous that way, but it wasn’t impossible if he started sliding down that slippery slope.
Without thinking, he picked up the remote off of the end table and tried to turn on the TV. It didn’t work, so he pressed the button a few times. Oh. Right. A single laugh puffed from his nostrils, and he tossed the remote. It tumbled end over end, glanced off of the wall and landed somewhere behind the couch. Perfect place for it, he thought.
Damn. He missed TV, though. He missed the internet. He missed being around girls. He hadn’t had a girlfriend in a while. Too busy working and getting high to keep up with all of the other stuff. Still, he missed the fleeting interactions he’d had with them of late. He missed the smell of them. Seemingly few of the local females had survived, and those who had lived hadn’t stayed around. He wasn’t certain when he’d last seen a living woman. It had been days. He hit the Camel, let the smoke billow about in his lungs a moment before he exhaled. He missed his parents, too.
And the images came to him again, the memories. He tried to stop them, but he couldn’t.
He peeked around the corner into the kitchen, crouched, afraid. Red puddled out across the black and white tiles. His dad was already dead, crumpled in the corner in a loose fetal position, throat slit by the looks of it, though it was hard to tell for certain with all of the blood.
The man’s hands gripped his mother’s throat in the center of the room. He straddled her, his knees pinning her arms to the floor. Her eyes looked wide, wild, almost comical if not for the circumstances. The man smirked, somewhere between disinterested and mildly amused. He lifted her then, and bashed her head into the floor. The others in his group looked on, their faces similarly blank, like this wasn’t a real human skull being cracked on the ceramic tile like an egg on the side of a frying pan, like it wasn’t really happening, just something on TV, some rerun they’d seen countless times before.
But Travis couldn’t stay for the end of this episode. He turned and ran, gliding through the hallway and the living room, fleeing through the front door, feet pounding down the steps, onto the sidewalk, into the street. He ran a long time. It wasn’t until he stopped that he realized that he was crying.
With the candle out, he sat in the dark in the living room. The cherry on the tip of his cigarette provided just enough light to see its red glow. All else was black. And quiet.
He squirmed in his seat, the chair squeaking under him, and he thought about the room around him that he couldn’t quite see. Living room. It seemed a strange term all of the sudden. Living room, the room you mostly lived in, he guessed. But was he living here? Not really. He was slowly killing himself in the living room with drugs and drink. Dying in the living room. It might take years, but that’s all it was.
He stood and walked out to the porch, dragging his fingertips along the wall to feel his way. The air was cool out here and thick and wet. He felt the cold humidity grip his torso like a soggy hug, though it felt somewhat far away thanks to the numbing flame of narcotics burning inside of him.
Around him, the black night stretched out forever. Total silence and nothingness stood in front of him. No moon or stars lit up the sky. Just gloom. He couldn’t even see the house across the street.
He brushed the back of his hand at his mouth and felt the vomit crusted to his chin. Whoops. Forgot to clean that up, apparently. He licked his fingers and tried to scrub at the barf.
He’d puked in the backyard after snorting that last oxy. That happened to him often, though. Whether he ate it or snorted it, oxycontin usually made him throw up, a weird watery vomit. Clear, mostly. And then as soon as he puked, he could feel the euphoria kick in, and nothing like puking really mattered quite so much anymore. He guessed that was why he forgot to wipe off his chin.
With the crust removed to his satisfaction, he felt around for the swing, found it, sat on it, and rocked in slow motion. Cold air tingled against his arms in a pleasant way, though his nose felt like a pointy piece of ice.
He thought of his parents again, this time remembering the process of dragging them out into the back yard to bury them. He’d cried the whole time. Inconsolable, shaking sobs like a baby. Then he cleaned up the puddle of blood where his dad bled out, the smear of red where his mom struggled. He mopped and scrubbed the tiles until the light ones went from red to pink to white again.
The power was still on then. People were sick and dying everywhere, and order was breaking down, but there was hope that things might get back to normal. It almost seemed funny to think back on it now.
He rocked the swing harder, and the cold dug its fingers deep into the meat of his arms. He flicked his cigarette butt out into the yard. That used to piss his dad off like nothing else, but it didn’t matter anymore. He was gone. Everyone was gone.
Diseases came and killed some, and people came and killed some, and the others all left once the power went out. And when his family needed him most, when life and death teetered on the line and they needed his help, he ran. He ran and ran and ran until he puked chili into the bushes outside of the post office, his lungs on fire, his throat on fire, his mouth on fire. He bent at the waist for a long time trying to get his breath back, a string of saliva dangling from his bottom lip, a pile of half-chewed beans in the dirt at his feet.
He’d run away. He’d always run away. The first time he got punched, he was outside of a gas station where kids bought Coke and junk food after school. He’d mouthed off to a kid with zits all over his face and the back of his neck. Couldn’t even remember what he said to him, but he was sure he was just busting balls. Nothing too mean. Running his mouth was all he ever did when he was in high school, all any of them did, but he was harmless, so nothing ever came of it, usually.
Anyway, this kid didn’t like it. He didn’t say anything in retaliation. He walked up and punched Travis, a right hook that went a little wide of the mark and got him in the ear. It didn’t hurt that bad, but Travis ran home crying. He was 14. Too old for that response, he knew, but so it went. The other kids made fun of him later, of course. He didn’t care. He was a coward. He knew that well enough without anyone pointing it out.
He slowed the swing down so he could light another cigarette. The burst of flame from the lighter made the world seem bright and warm for a split second. It hurt his eyes a little, and a pink splotch hovered in his vision where the fire had burned. He sat back, rested his shoulders against the swing, and breathed smoke while the oval of pink danced across the black nothing.
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
42 days before
They walked on the beach in his dream, bare feet sinking into that wet sand right at the water’s edge. The wind blew so hard it felt like it might knock them down. It was cold as hell, too. The chill enveloped him, snaked icy tendrils deep into the core of his body, but he somehow found it more exhilarating than miserable. He stretched his arms out to the sides, and his jacket billowed and flapped behind him.
Mitch looked at Janice, but she did not look back at him. They walked together, but it somehow felt more like she was passing by. She stared into space, her face expressionless like one of those dead porcelain dolls again.
Dead. That seemed important. Mitch thought about it, tried to make sense of it. He looked down at the water while he thought, watched the wet lap at the sand.
A thud emitted somewhere nearby. It s
ounded like it came from straight ahead, but there was nothing there but sand, so he stopped walking and swiveled his head around. He saw nothing. Just beach that stretched out forever, and water that went farther still. The sound didn’t fit this place, either. It sounded like something solid landing on asphalt or concrete. Things landing in the sand would make a muffled noise, and things landing in the water would mostly sploosh, he thought.
What the hell?
He couldn’t puzzle it out, but he knew now that something here didn’t make sense. He jogged a few paces to catch up with Janice. They walked on a while, and there were no more sounds but the wind and the waves.
Still, he couldn’t shake that paranoia, that tingling feeling that he should know more about what’s going on, that he was missing something obvious.
As soon as the scraping started, he knew the beach must be a dream. He recognized the noise. It was the distinct sound of something dragged over cement. Something heavy. Maybe something on a sidewalk or a driveway. He pictured someone pushing an upright piano over the sidewalk in front of their house. The scrape sounded warbly and far away, though, almost like it was wet. In Mitch’s experience, that’s the way the real world sounded when you heard it from within a dream.
He turned to Janice.
“I’m dreaming,” he said.
She said nothing. She didn’t look at him, just walked into the wind with that same dead look in her eye.
“I need to wake up,” he said.
The wind blew harder now, and sand whipped at his face, the grit getting in his eyes after a second. He leaned over and rubbed at his eyelids with the heels of his hands. He knew you weren’t supposed to do that, that you could scratch your cornea, but he couldn’t help it. He needed to wake up.