Mondo Crimson

by Andrew Post

  Chapter Thirteen

  Now

  When she came to, there was a clown looking in at her from a window. But he wasn’t moving, just standing there smiling, and it wasn’t a window, but a framed painting hung on the floral-print wallpaper – a shitty painting at that, all blobs of primary colors, no shading, little to no detail, but still stomach-turning to look at for some reason she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Mel was lying on a large four-poster bed. It was the only thing in the room. Dents in the carpet showed where other furniture had been. A door stood half-open; she could see a toilet and shower. She felt sick when she stood and her ears were still ringing and her throat hurt and, like before, she felt like a prisoner not only in her circumstances but inside her body as well. She just couldn’t stop waking up in this hell.

  She tried the door and wasn’t surprised to find it locked. She went to the windows and found they’d been nailed shut and metal bars had been put over them outside. Past them, there was nothing to see. She was on the second floor; there was a tree line across a snow-covered yard, and a yellow rectangle drawn on the snow by a window on the lower floor. She could hear music, faint, somewhere else in the house, blasting.

  In the bathroom, there were no windows, no shower curtain or rod, the mirror had been removed from the medicine cabinet, which itself contained nothing. On the bathroom wall were three shallow scratches in a row. Then she noticed something chalky packed under her thumb’s nail. I made those. I was counting something.

  The days.

  She was not waking up in this room for the first time. A gooey type of déjà vu hit her, seeing herself like physical echoes, remembering she’d mistaken the clown painting for a real clown looking at her through a window. Then trying the door, then checking the windows, then coming in here to the bathroom and finding these marks – when there’d only been one, then two, and now three.

  Three days.

  And then more burbled back to her, why her ears were still ringing. Russian roulette. Felix shooting a man in his bandaged head. A crystal bowl taken down from the mantelpiece with reverence. Felix filling it like taking from a waterfall. Presenting it to her like it was not what it was, but something, to him, much greater than that. An invitation.

  One that she did not know if she had accepted and that terrified her. She remembered talk of vegetables, green beans and broccoli and brussels sprouts, but the connective tissue was not there; how that related was not coming forward. Her stomach still twisted and her throat went drier than it already was, biologically knowing if not consciously knowing, meat aware before the mind. She barely got the toilet lid lifted in time.

  It just kept coming. She’d had so much in her.

  Dark red. Flakes of brown. Pieces of pink. A hair that was not the color of her own.

  Horrified, she rushed to push the lever and flushed the truth away, but it did not clear the knowledge from her mind. It’d already gotten inside, what she’d done, what she’d been made to do.

  It scared her that she did not feel any worse than she did. She had sprung out of the bed, scared, for sure, but not propelled by that alone. Some other drive was in her, pushing her along, and she did not want to think that it was because of the blood she’d been made to drink, why she was feeling so okay. She was not tired and though covered in bruises, none of them hurt. Upsetting.

  The toilet’s lever was chrome. Though distorted and stretched out and looking kind of like a horse, she checked her teeth in its reflection. Every one of her teeth was stained pink. Her eyes were vibrating. She looked inhuman. She wanted to vomit again, and got herself in position to do so, but nothing came up this time, she’d gotten rid of it all, but again – the guilt and disgust was still there, impossible to purge. It’d likely never go away, if she survived this.

  Now a part of me. My new normal.

  She sat on the bathtub’s rim and tried thinking about what in this old out-of-date bathroom her uncle would change, how he would see it, trying to dislodge herself from the present in any way she could. She put her hands over her face as if to keep her head from bursting open. But then she recoiled, smelling something awful. It was her, she was what smelled. It was coming from her cast, from inside it. She noticed someone, at some point, had written YOUR FUCKED on it and inside it no longer itched or ached. Worrying.

  A memory that didn’t feel so stolen, that didn’t come to her as if only half-emerged from a fog, but clear. Brenda, struggling to breathe, and looking at her, an awareness that this was the end written in her eyes.

  Don’t just take what they give you. Give it right back to—

  And that’s when Mel had gotten blinded and deafened as, inches from her face, Brenda’s head got blown apart. But Mel thought she could guess how her interrupted final words were meant to end.

  Give it right back to them.

  Mel stood, fought her vertigo, and opened the medicine cabinet. Down near the bottom there was a small opening, wide enough to barely accept a playing card.

  She got down on her knees and looked under the sink and saw some black mold had started to weaken the plaster. She pressed an open hand to the floor, feeling the vibration of the dance music being blasted downstairs. And when she was confident she could match its beat, thrust her bare foot against the wall.

  Thump, thump, pause.

  Thump, thump, pause.

  Thump, thump, crack.

  With the edge of her hand she swept up the broken pieces of plaster into a mound. It could be ground back into powder and, with some water from the tap, be used again, for any number of applications. Like getting one thing to stick to another.

  She carefully reached inside the wall and felt something bite, something sharp going under the fingernail. She withdrew her hand and found a razor blade stuck on the end of her finger, rusty and old, but it still had an edge.

  * * *

  Red Solo cup in hand, Merritt stood in line in Felix’s kitchen, waiting for his turn to use the microwave. The contents in the cooler he’d brought hadn’t lasted an hour. The two ice chests that had arrived the same time he had, those were getting down to the bottom now. There was a low thrum of tension in the house. Every night when Felix’s grandfather clock tolled 10 p.m., the revelers rose from wherever they had collapsed and the music got turned back on and the fun continued. Some would line up to get sick in the bathroom, some who had left practices like that behind would go out in the yard and void the liquid from their bowels across the snow, but eventually everyone joined the line in the kitchen as Felix used a measuring cup to administer two cups of mondo to each of his guests and let them microwave their ration to their preferred temperature. No one brought their complaints to Merritt because they all understood who he was to Felix, but he’d overheard things. How they liked it better before when they could just serve themselves, that it felt too much like being back in their high school cafeteria, having their portions decided for them. But once their cup was full and they were back on the dance floor, the complaints ended.

  Merritt hated being around people at the best of times and had hoped at some point the revelers would realize they’d overstayed their welcome and go away and leave Felix and him alone. He didn’t know who any of them were. He was certain none of them had worked as hard as he had to make this party happen. They were the leeches. Some he’d even overheard saying they didn’t know whose house this was, referring to Felix as just that weird old guy. The guests were young and old, hip and unhip, every size, shape, and color. But addiction is happy to visit all, Merritt decided. It only needs to be shown the door and it’ll walk right through it, no questions asked.

  Is this what Felix wanted instead of taking work orders? A bunch of hangers-on and users ruining his house, taking for free what Merritt and Felix had worked so hard to make? Merritt didn’t want to be a party pooper, but how long could this possibly hold? The minute the mondo ran dry they’d
be gone as fast as they’d shown up, drifting off like a cloud of glutted mosquitoes to find some other generous host to butter up with compliments before going behind their back to prick and suck them dry as well.

  When it came to be Merritt’s turn, Felix reached across the kitchen island with the measuring cup and gave him two cups, then a splash extra. He might’ve winked at Merritt but because he was still wearing his sunglasses it might’ve just been a twitch. Merritt microwaved his cup for ten seconds.

  He climbed over the toppled Christmas tree in the main hall and tried going to the sewing room to find some isolation, but there were a bunch of people fucking on the floor. It was still too hard to breathe in the drawing room because of the fire that’d nearly killed them all. Did anyone thank Merritt for saving their lives? No. Of course not. The floor of the drawing room had unceremoniously become where the dead were to be dragged, and Merritt would’ve been fine in there but seeing so many corpses in one place reminded him too much of working and he was trying to enjoy his vacation. Buckley Dauber was still in the parlor hanging off the side of his wheelchair, arms and neck covered in hickey-ringed bite marks. Evidence of vultures having difficulty adjusting to a considerably more restricted daily allotment.

  Merritt had a bite mark on his wrist. It was dangerous to fall asleep with the door unlocked around here. Lesson learned.

  It was getting desperate now. It was still loud in the house but quieter than it’d been when he first arrived. When the revelers could still be blissfully ignorant about how, like anything, mondo was also a finite resource, it’d been pure debauch then. In every room a showcase of waste and decadence. A slip-and-slide down the main hall, with mondo instead of soapy water. Not a beer bong, a blood bong. Water balloon fights with the stuff. A drinking game where wagers were made in the number of fingers they were willing to lose. A man wearing only his birthday suit doing a handstand in the kitchen, two friends holding his ankles to maintain his balance, a funnel in his ass, and a gallon of mondo poured in. So much doped-up splendor, laughter bubbling from faces with shaking, bloodshot eyes, everywhere he turned. Orgies that’d spill out of a bedroom and into the hall in a greasy, undulating snake of body linked to body linked to body, pausing only to sneer at Merritt, the woefully unfuckable. Felix up on stage in the library, belting out Jimmy Fontana’s ‘Il Mondo,’ which had become something of a favorite around the house lately, as a girl with perfect everything poured mondo down her leg and into Felix’s mouth and then like a fire breather he sprayed it into the faces of his sea of enraptured bootlickers.

  No different from when it was just him and Mom, Merritt fell back into the habit of watching a lot of TV by himself after everyone else had fallen asleep. According to the news, it was getting worse out there, beyond the Eberhardt estate’s high walls, outside the thin membrane of the red bubble that’d surely never go pop. No one thought the homeless could organize, not without a phone to group text or access to social media, but organize they could, evidently. Carrier pigeons and smoke signals were the most laughable theories. Regardless of how they’d planned it, on Christmas morning, in every major city, there’d been raids on stores as well as homes. What wasn’t nailed down went with them, piled onto their backs. Truckers were reporting homeless people storming the interstates, dropping tree limbs or lighting lines drawn in gasoline to block their path and then stealing everything the truckers had been trying to get to its destination. Though not a single person had been injured, the way the news detailed this widespread theft of material goods, they still kept using the word violence. It was violent, they said, what they were doing by taking what was not theirs. Our precious stuff, our beloved things, our cherished objects. Across the entire length of an overpass in Los Angeles, i got mine and now i got yours too had been spray-painted in alternating red and green letters, Christmas colors.

  Fine. He missed Brenda. Maybe not the actual human being, but what she represented for him. He didn’t realize how often he thought about her until after she was gone. He kept catching himself thinking of her in the present tense, as still alive, as something he still had yet to do. But it was over. He’d reached his destiny, she her fate, it was over.

  And now that he was idle and without a job to do or someplace he needed to be, Dad and Winston were starting to show up again in Merritt’s peripheries. A glance of a headless man dancing in the crowd filling the library, vanishing in the tide change of bodies. A boy with dusty eyes and a bent neck standing at the top of the stairs but gone when Merritt climbed up there. Looking at him through the spindles of a higher railing. Peeking out from behind a potted plant, between spines on a bookshelf, from under chairs, a single bone-white eye down inside his red Solo cup after he’d taken the last sip.

  Merritt told himself, You have a full ration, your daily allotment, and it always makes you feel better, so go find a place where you can be alone and in absence of work to do or any other purpose keeping your feet moving, enjoy your drink. It’ll push them back. It always does.

  Out in the garage, hoping that’d be his place to be alone, Merritt found a redheaded girl who couldn’t have been a day over twenty squatting back behind Felix’s Ferrari having, it seemed, dug the empty blood bags out of the trash, sucking out whatever last drops she could get. She showed him her red teeth and scuttled around to face into the corner, chewing medical plastic.

  Merritt looked at Little Bastard parked behind its velvet cordons. Like most Porsches, the trunk was in front. And it was in this Porsche’s trunk that Felix kept the mondo under lock and key, in addition to every guest’s phone and Merritt’s duffle of weapons as well. That was the one rule: no guns other than the ones Felix let you borrow to settle a dispute, but then you had to give them right back. It didn’t stop the partiers from still occasionally killing each other, obviously, as evidenced by the drawing room turned morgue, but they had to get creative about it and use whatever they could find, the house slowly becoming several simultaneous, overlapping games of Clue.

  Felix came into the garage, dragging behind him one of the ice chests. He had a hard time closing the door because the partiers wanted seconds. He had to threaten them with the Colt, the gun that’d killed his mother now being used as a threat no different than a schoolteacher’s martial yardstick. Felix stopped when he noticed Merritt was in the garage, standing next to Little Bastard.

  “Let me guess. You want to bitch at me about how you need another refill too.”

  Merritt looked down into his cup. “No, actually, I haven’t even started in on this one yet.”

  “Good. Because I’m done playing Mr. Drive Thru Window for the night. Move.”

  Merritt stepped aside and watched Felix lift Little Bastard’s hood. He tried to help Felix lift the ice chest to put it inside but Felix slapped his hand away. “I fucking got it. I’m old but not helpless.”

  Merritt saw his maroon duffle bag lying inside the trunk, those familiar shapes pushing through its nylon surface. And all the other guns Felix wasn’t keeping on his person – everything from the upstairs trophy room, rifles and elephant guns and a Thompson machine gun, a sea of loose bullets. Felix dropped the ice chest in on top of the weaponry but left the trunk lid open, giving a start when he noticed the redheaded girl who had been going through the trash had materialized on the other side of the car, mouth ringed in red, looking in at the ice chest dope-eyed.

  “Don’t get any bright ideas, you,” Felix said, pointing at her. “This is the last of it. I’m not going to get strung up by my toenails because you couldn’t control yourself, little missy. I see those thirsty eyes, but we’re all thirsty, we just got to be patient. Now go on, take your freaky Chucky-looking ass back inside with the others.” And when she moved away from the car, sulking, dragging her feet, Felix turned to Merritt. “You too. Back inside.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mel put her back to the bedroom wall where, when the door opened, she would be behind it. In her
left hand, she had a makeshift club taken from the four-poster bed. Encasing her right arm was the cast, but your fucked could no longer be read because she had taken the razor blades, carefully worked them into the surface down its length but not deep enough it would cut her arm inside, and then fixed each blade in place by repurposing the broken plaster. A quantity were grouped tightly on the end, over her fist, making it a bristling, rusted-metal porcupine for an arm.

  She waited, thinking about home, about her parents and her uncle, about Dani and what she might be doing right now, how she might be spending her Christmas. Mel couldn’t imagine it resembled the one she, herself, was having. She hoped not anyway. No one deserved this. But what Mel was going to give right back to Felix as he had given it to her, he deserved that, every goddamn ounce of it. To turn around an expression he was likely not unfamiliar with, he was asking for it. She might even ask him to smile for her. It can’t be that bad, me pulling your guts out through your ass. Give us a smile, sweetheart. Sugar. Cutie Pie. Pumpkin.