by John Everson
Dave wiped a tear from his own face as he remembered Becky and reached down to pick up a chunk of asphalt, weighing it in his palm. She had been his only friend other than Gram for over three years now. She had given him his first book of Shakespeare, and satisfied the corresponding thirst for literature which that volume awakened in him. Becky had once been an English professor, and her tutelage gave him the education which the state never again would provide. It was she who had coined the phrase “the last plague” and now she herself had succumbed to its snare.
He pitched the lump of concrete at the growing spiderweb in the windshield of an ’85 Oldsmobile. The glass shuddered and the rock rebounded to plunge through a rusted hole in the hood, vanishing with a clunk into the remains of the engine. The tires had long since deflated and were inhabited by colonies of warring ants. Small green and yellow leaves poked above the cracks and crevices of the hood and roof where dust and decomposing leaves had accumulated over the years.
“There just wasn’t anything me or Gram could do,” he thought, kicking at a smashed television set. Everywhere it was the same. Gram had once been convinced at first that the whole affair was a foreign ploy to complete the slow decay of the West, so the U.S. could be won without a fight. But in a dozen years they hadn’t seen a new face in the town.
If anyone was actually behind it, they’d won a hollow victory. It had been an insidious change. Peace and love and prosperity first; all the flower children causes of another age seemed to prevail; but this fleeting golden age was followed by a complacent decline. The high intellect professions were the first to go. Soon newspapers stopped printing, because people stopped purchasing them and reporters stopped going to work. Nobody cared anymore.
“Pathogenic apathy,” Dave termed it. Gram had said at one point there were nail factories producing heads which would never be hammered and auto plants manufacturing vehicles which would never be driven.
“In fact, nothing is being driven,” he thought as he passed another decaying car. He stared at the darkening sky. The distant suns seemed to shine with increased clarity every year.
“The only good the plague ever did for us,” Gram would say. “It’s killing the smog.” He noticed the dull glow on the horizon opposite the meager purple remains of the sunset. “Someone’s still there at least,” he thought grimly.
With a glance around at the countryside he realized how far he had come, and remembered with a twinge of guilt that he didn’t want to leave Gram alone long, tonight especially. Reagan had been missing from his side for some time.
“Not paying the old boy enough attention,” he realized and shrugged. Cupping his hands to his mouth he called the dog’s name, but received no reply. The night remained oppressively silent as he turned to retrace his path. The wind was picking up, blowing his knotted hair into his eyes. He brushed it back with an unconscious reaction, realizing that a storm was blowing in. “I suppose the mutt can fend for himself. Always has.” The road wound its way slowly back into the barren village. The only noises were of loose garbage cans rattling and tree branches scraping against old screens, straining and clawing to capture the comatose inhabitants within.
The street lamps stood dark, long since extinguished by hordes of children on guerrilla missions with BB guns. No one had been around to replace them, but through the windows of many houses, the colors of the rainbow emerged in a wrenching spectrum of reflection and projection. There was something intrinsically wrong with that light, and Dave’s eyes strove to exclude it from their focus.
It was near the edge of town that he noticed the barking.
“The pack must be excited about something,” he thought. Unconsciously he stepped up his pace and realized they were getting closer. He did a quick about face, and scanned the meadowland just as they crested a rise about a hundred yards away. He squinted to see the leader. It was Reagan! And he was leading a pack of snarling hungry dogs straight at him! He knew hunting cries, and that’s what was issuing from the anguished vocal cords of the pack. He ran.
The town, which before had seemed small, tame and unpopulated, was suddenly a vicious metropolis. His breath came in short, unnatural rasps, with quick, pained intakes when the soles of his feet met the remnants of human society strewn across the road. He passed abandoned shops, the moonlight jeering off the jagged glass remaining in the storefront windows. They were just three blocks away when he twisted a bloody foot between the railroad tracks. He looked up with renewed hope as he saw the ravaged Crepin car just two houses away. Lurching to his feet, he staggered across the wild, prairie-reclaimed lawns, rubbing against thistles and dandelions, leaving a cloud of white floating seeds to mark his passage. The Crepin’s front door was open a crack and he plunged through it just as the dogs crossed the tracks. He bolted the door behind him, and limped his way to the stairs, praying they wouldn’t find a broken window on the ground floor to get in.
Upstairs, he chose a room with a window facing the front of the house to observe the pack. “Obviously Jack’s mother’s room,” he thought as he pushed aside the faded pink chintz curtains from the glass and stared into the street below. The dogs were waiting at the door, scratching the mail chute with a grating sound that gave him the chills. Desolation washed over him. “The hounds of hell,” he wheezed, disturbing the heavy air around him. “And Reagan their leader. I should have expected it. Nature is directing her vengeance on all men, not just the ones she doesn’t like. Why should I escape?” But suddenly a feeling of exhilaration filled him. Reagan stood apart from the other animals, wagging his tail and whining. “Maybe he just came when I called, and they just followed, scenting food.”
His eyes had become accustomed to the house’s dreary interior, but as he examined the contents of the room, it dawned that something was very wrong with this particular shelter. His gaze swiveled from the shadowy dresser and night table along one wall to the queen size antique four-post bed on the other. The bed was not empty.
Dave stared with a growing lump in his throat at the darkness which divided the mattress in half with its mass. And deduced the source of the room’s odor. With the taste of bile in his throat, he quickly exited the room containing the putrifying remains of Mrs. Rhona Crepin.
He darted out the back door, ignoring the shooting pains in his feet and the canine threat, but hadn’t gotten far before they were on his trail again. He hopped a couple fences to slow them up, but knew he wasn’t going to make it home tonight, one way or the other. He heard their hoarse barking and baying behind him and could feel his blood pumping through his pounding head. His ears felt on fire, his chest burned as his lungs struggled to pull oxygen in through a constricted throat. He would have to get into another house or be chewed to a bloody mess by the maddened hounds.
He spotted Jenny Finner’s house on his right and on a whim dashed to the side door. He had once had a deep crush on Jenny before the plague had touched her. “Chased by hungry mutts into dead people’s houses,” he laughed and choked as he stumbled across the grass. “What a situation! No we don’t have rapists or convicts, Gram, we have ravenous pets!”
He threw himself through the door and slammed it behind him with enough force to knock an antique dish from its perch on the kitchen wall. It smashed on the floor, one piece spinning around and around in a circle, toilet bowl effect. Just when he was about to step on the damn thing, it was still. Dave collapsed to his knees, resting his flaming head against the door frame. The sweat ran down his face in tiny rivulets, and his breath came in heaves. Blood from his feet smeared the floor. “Good housekeeper’’ he observed, glancing with disgust at the litter which covered the tiled floor. The cabinets hung open at crazy angles, and drawers, kitchen implements and empty cans lay everywhere. “This may be beyond even Mr. Clean,” he said aloud.
“Dave?” a dreamy voice asked from behind him.
He jumped to his feet, thought better of it, and fell heavily against the wall. She stood a few feet away, holding out a trembling hand.
He knew it was Jenny, but a far different Jenny than the one he once idolized. This Jenny was dirty, emaciated, her eyes nearly vacant. She resembled the kitchen – quiescently falling to ruin. But some of her old beauty remained. Her face still betrayed those strong but soft lines leading in a sensuous curve from her high cheekbones to her pink pouting lips. Her breasts poked through a frayed, stained t-shirt.
“Jen,” he gulped, dumbfounded at finding her alive – and finding himself still, in spite of everything, attracted to her.
“You don’t look very good, Davy,” she said, her gaze fixed on the third button of his shirt.
“Me,” he laughed. “What about…” He stopped in mid-sentence as the lips he had always longed to touch attached themselves to his own. With that kiss, he knew the Jenny he loved was gone; the replacement was a shallow mockery. Ants skittered out of their way as they sat down at a sticky table.
“Sit a minute. Let me get you a drink,” she said, and moved to pick up a bottle from the counter. “Then you can tell me why all those nasty puppies chased you to my door. Zoron must have willed it for me. I’ve wanted a man for a long time now.”
Dave cringed at the childlike fantasy quality of her speech, and longed to leave. In some ways seeing her like this was worse than Becky’s trance, or smelling the worm-ridden guts of Mrs. Crepin. This was active psychological devolution, and it made him sicker than any physical decay could. But outside the dogs were still whining, and he could barely walk. For now, escape was impossible.
Jenny poured them each a glass of liquid and returned to the table. Dave drained his in a gulp, and at her insistence recounted his experience with the dogs while she stared at him in admiration.
“You’re lucky I was awake, you know. I’m usually farlish by this time.” She rose. “C’mon, let’s go into the living room.”
Dave’s knees threatened to give out, but with her support, they staggered dizzily to an ancient couch. He noticed in the back of his mind that the dogs had stopped barking, so it should be safe to go home soon. Gram would be worried sick. His entire body was becoming numb, and his head was spinning. It was as if he’d just downed half a bottle of tequila. She leaned over and kissed him, hard, as a growing suspicion took hold in his mind.
“Jenny,” he mumbled, pushing her away. “What was in that drink?”
“Oh, are you ready now?” She chirped happily. “I’ll turn on the Cinevox for you.”
He wanted to scream, to reach out with his leaded arms and strangle the girl. She only smiled dumbly and moved across the room. He knew he’d never be able to do either. In fact, he’d probably never leave this house again. Unwittingly he had drunk the catalyst of “the last plague” – as had Becky and the rest of the world in an unprecedented lemming-like escape from reality. When those computer-induced and maintained spectrum shifts met with his optic nerves. . . Helplessly he watched her walk across the room to the large screen in slow motion, his lips still moist.
“Thy drugs are quick,” he recited bitterly. “Thus with a kiss I die.”
He felt Jenny slide her body in close to his own. She smelled of stale urine and other odors of neglect.
“I wanted her,” he thought.
In slow motion, he turned his head to the screen. “But not like this…”
“Farlish,” giggled Jenny, as a thin strand of spittle spun from her lip.
And then the shifting coalescing patterns entered his brain, the heightened awareness of the drug sensitizing every nerve to the touch of the burning computer serials of color. His eyes found heaven – perpetual stimulated happiness, and his consciousness sank into an inescapable sensual oblivion.
Lightning lit the sky, as the storm unleashed its torrential fury on the decaying apparatus of man. The water pounded the asphalt, removing another fleck of concrete here or there. Small victories, but continual ones. And nature wasn’t hampered by clocks, or time.
Reagan whined to himself while cowering with the pack in the hills, longing for the touch of his friend. And a mantel clock steadily ticked off the hours, muffled by nature’s watery demolition.
And an old woman cried, and was truly alone.
Artists in nearly all media have their favorite “included at the very last minute” stories. Bands always seem to land their biggest hit single from the song that they tucked onto the album just hours before the final CD sleeves were printed. The following story was written specifically for this collection, thanks to the artwork Andrew Shorrock developed for the color illustration. Since he lives in England and I’m near Chicago, we couldn’t easily talk in person or on the phone about what I wanted to define the “look” of the book, but after e-mailing back and forth and sharing some of the stories with him, he came up with a visual metaphor for love and sex, pain and beauty, obsessions and relationships that I found immediately powerful and evocative. It was just days later that I felt compelled to write the following story based on his imagery.
Bloodroses
anya loved the roses; she only wished she could look at them. Every morning, her husband Mel guided her down the stairs from her bedroom, through the house, and down the rocky steps to the rose garden.
“Let me help you with that,” he’d say, and tenderly lift the shirt over her head, undo her brassiere and slide her pants to the ground. With a kiss and a pat he sent her forth, into the tangle of thorns and leaves and sharp, rocky earth.
Tanya loved to run naked through the rose garden. She loved to feel their feathery touches, their sharp bite. Once she had been able to smell the humid sugar of their perfume, and see the vibrant smears of crimson across their petals. But that was long ago. Now Tanya could only experience her rose garden by touch, and so she drew the prickling bushes to her bosom and bled with every kiss of their stingy boughs.
She’d been 16 when it happened. Skin of virgin vanilla, cheeks blushed bright cherry, eyes like sapphires glinting against the stark satin of her raven hair. The boy then had been called Marshall, and she met him late each evening, a mute moon the only spectator to their urgent, exploring gropings.
They whispered and laughed and lay down on the bricks to stare out at the stars. “I wonder who’s out there,” they said aloud, inside, thinking, “I wonder who’s in here.”
She had ached for the taste of his tongue as the tickle of fallen rose blossoms caressed her neck. Each night after 10 she would climb down the trellis beneath her bedroom and wait on the brick patio by the fountain. She always heard him before he arrived, heavy shoes clicking like flint strikes against the stone. She was smoking inside; nearly ready to go up. Each night as they kissed and necked, he was tender with her and warm; at first. But as their meetings lengthened, as the moon waxed, his fingers strayed from tremulous sneak attacks beneath her shirt to bolder thrusts beneath her skirts and he grew insistent. One night, as the moon blinded the owls with its full searchlight shine, he pressed for more.
First he stripped her favorite blue t-shirt from her completely, a bold move there just yards from her father’s back door. “Wait,” she whispered, but not too convincingly. Soon her jeans were gone too, and his own flesh fully exposed to the wan tan of the moon, and open to the massage of her hands. A tremor ran through her belly at this unfamiliar territory, but still, his flesh felt soft and delicate, yet solid as wood. She could feel herself heat and grow with his watering kisses, her tight bud engorging with first passion to unravel in a satin-slick flower of invitation.
But then with the pass of a cloud over the faerie light she shivered and whispered “no.”
He seemed not to hear and pressed himself tighter to her. She felt the rose of passion wither and scorch and pushed with tight fists against his shoulders again “no.”
“Yes,” he answered this time, through gritted teeth. “I can’t wait anymore.”
A pain shot through her like a thousand barbs of thorn, and Tanya at last opened her mouth to scream, only to have it filled with his tongue, his thick, sour tongue that suddenly tasted not so deli
cate and fine but fat and base and ashy with the flavor of cigarettes. She panicked then, and struck him in the ear with a fist, but he didn’t relent, in fact her struggles only seemed to encourage him. Replacing his mouth with a gritty palm he held her to the brick as he took her, impervious to her cries and wiggles and wide eyes. Finally she bit down on his hand, hard, so that she felt the skin give way. The hand yanked backwards, but rather than nurse his wound, her sweet and gentle Marshall brought that hand back down in a closed fist and struck her fast and ruthless in the mouth.
And again.
With his hands on her neck then, he kissed her, but not with the blending of a lover, rather with the penetrating jabs of a conqueror savoring his bloody victory. Then he pulled back to ride her in animal anxiousness, lifting her head with each thrust and slamming it back to the brick with each release.
Tanya felt the warmth pooling beneath her head, at the same time as it slicked and gathered beneath her buttocks. Her heart was screaming in horror as her flesh screamed in pain. How could this be happening? How could she have been so wrong about this boy, this wicked young man? She swam in a sea of black filth, every light touch and kiss of the past nights re-experienced as a violation, a betrayal. There were stars of hurt in her eyes as the heady scent of roses engulfed her like a savior cloud as Marshall came to climax. She breathed it in and savored it as if to blot out the knowledge of the situation, eyes closed, mind seeking another world. And then its sweet perfume turned sickly in her nose, icy sharp in its character, like rotting candy. Distantly she felt him remove himself, heard the rustle of his jeans dragged across stone. Heard him murmur “shit.” She kept her eyes closed as he scurried away into the night.
When she woke next, Tanya strained to see through the blackness, but could not. Her nose felt sniffy, but she could not smell the roses.