“I hear yours isn’t bad to begin with,” he commented. “Don’t worry about it. Worrying about it is only going to make it worse.”
“I’m not worried about it; I’m going to conquer the damn thing,” I replied.
“I’ll know when that happens. We’ll throw you a party,” Matthew assured. I elbowed him hard, and he laughed. “Doubt it can be done, though. Yeah, that would be party-worthy.”
“Doubt it can be done?” I exclaimed, acting affronted. “I’m gonna get my party!”
Our time together was safe and satisfying and funny. We enjoyed the different perspectives our genders had given us, and we were able to share with each other about it comfortably. It’s difficult to be with Matthew and not live in the moment. But describing him? It’s about as difficult as describing what love is.
Thom approached me with a bottle of my favorite tea. It was cold, fresh from the lake.
“Hi, T,” I greeted him.
“Hey, you. Icebreaker,” he said, as if one might be necessary. He opened the bottle before handing it over to me. It was a thoughtful, sweet gesture: he knew I would’ve struggled with rupturing the bottle’s seal.
I’d been playing with a flower. I thinned out the stem as an experiment to see whether it would break—I slit it open and scraped away the middle layers. Then I tied it into a knot. The stem held. Why hadn’t I tried this with the daisies I wove? There were times this trick would’ve come in handy.
Thom said, “I want to apologize about my reaction to the leeches.”
“I should have warned you,” I answered. I felt bad about not giving him proper notice before leeching him. I’d forgotten most people weren’t accustomed to such things. I passed Thom the reddish-orange Indian paintbrush I’d been holding. An icebreaker for an icebreaker. I like balance. He tucked the flower into one of his shirt’s buttonholes, carefully arranging the knotted stem so it would stay put.
“What did Andrew and John do, anyway?” I finally had the chance to ask.
“We were carrying that wood-burning cook stove in. You know, from the big old house up the road?”
“Mm-hm.” It was a nice stove. Cast iron, heavy. Probably weighed well over five hundred pounds.
“John and Mattie and I had gotten it to the tents, and Mattie wanted to stop to get a drink. Andrew insisted he could help us get it the rest of the way, but”—Thom’s voice was tinged with anger—“he’s such an idiot. He couldn’t handle the weight, wouldn’t admit it, and dropped his edge of the stove without warning. When it tipped, the grate door came open, and it caught my hand and tore my fingers. Looks so much better now. Thank you.”
I hadn’t done much. “Thank the Joes.”
“Kinda like to keep my fingers attached.”
“Yeah, I like them that way, too.”
Thom hugged me quickly and walked off.
uthouse Duty was often referred to as “Doody Duty.” I loathed it. It was gross, yes, but I was used to nasty things. Rotters smelled worse than those pits. Worse by far. But Doody Duty always sucked me into the Tar Pit. The disgusting mess dredged up bad memories.
Following my stepfather’s Programs, those of us who weren’t too crippled to assist were responsible for cleaning up the small theater where the barbarity had taken place. The stage always looked like an abattoir, and it took hours to scrub the blood and flesh of our siblings from its parquet floor, making sure it was spic-and-span, lest portions of our own bodies be added to the detritus.
It was even worse cleaning the area where the crowds congregated. Some sat to merely watch, and some stood in the general admission pit up front to hoot and wave money around to buy a turn to defile us. They didn’t fully leave when the Program was over, though. They left parts of themselves behind: viscid cum and spit on the backs of the seats and floor, cigarette butts, sunflower seed shells, sickening mixtures of various types of alcohol in puddles, vomit, dried blood from fistfights that often broke out, the occasional pool of urine from someone who’d become sloppier drunk than he probably intended. Once I found some guy’s business card stuck in the frame of a restroom mirror. Why not? It’s not like the police were doing anything to stop these awful events or punish those who attended, so it was as good a place as any to trawl for clients for one’s flagging life insurance pyramid scheme. Being confronted with all the evidence of how popular these Programs had become always made me feel extra-stuck in the mire, knowing nobody was going to help me.
I tried to turn my mind away from it as I finished shoveling muck, chucked some ash into the last pit, and pushed the full wheelbarrow off toward the dumping area. I deposited the load and returned the wheelbarrow to its spot by the last outhouse.
After getting myself cleaned and sanitized, I wandered from camp. I had no other plans or responsibilities for the day. I wound my way randomly through the forest, following a crooked, invisible trail around the tree trunks. Rule #9: Getting lost may help you find yourself. This was about the closest I could come to getting lost.
I took off my shoes and socks, and scrambled quickly up a tall spruce, perching in the higher branches and swaying with the tree in the breeze. I leaned my head against the trunk, not minding that pitch would be working its way into my hair and forming knots.
After a moment, I scooted about a foot away from the trunk. I sat with my legs dangling over the branch. My feet swung back and forth, kicking at my invisible demons. Slimy and barbed, they crept in between my bare toes like a prickly coating. I wondered whether the sensations would have been different if I’d left my shoes on.
I resigned myself to letting this slick there-but-not-there membrane spread over me. It carried along a deeper depression which left me… desolated? No. Forsaken? No. Not feeling, after all. It left me numb.
I watched the clouds racing each other in the sky, layers of them at varying heights.
Thom appeared at the base of the tree and began to climb.
“You’re awfully hard to track,” he said as he settled on a branch below me. The tree rocked farther now, in its restless swaying dance.
Thom watched me thoughtfully. In time, he reached out to touch my foot, which was sticky with pitch. From where he sat, the leaves and thorns and branches of my stepfather’s carving were easily visible. I stared off absently, and he studied them. I wanted this bout of not feeling to last forever.
A huge flock of birds flew past, certain of where they were headed and what they wanted. Thom watched them until they were out of sight, but I closed my eyes and released them to move on with their lives right away.
“Nothing?” he asked.
I tried to reply. The word “nothing” stuck behind my lips, like the astronaut ice cream that had stuck to Renee’s teeth.
Nothing.
Let me remain a stone. I knew this wish would be denied. Shortly thereafter, the inescapable denial became mockery. Numbness dropped from me like gravity had suddenly grabbed it and whisked it away.
With his thumb, Thom traced the outline of roses at the side of my ankle and heel, where the actual flowers began. Maybe his fingers on top of my foot had felt my pulse’s change. Maybe I’d shifted slightly without realizing. Maybe my breathing pattern altered. I don’t know how he knew, but Thom looked up and realized my Nothingness was gone.
I thought I might lose my grip on sanity, and that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Thom spoke low, confiding:
I am darker than the darkest darkness.
I am damaged; scarred and broken, inside and out.
I always will be.
I am a vacuum, a black hole, a null set.
Now I am a stone. I am immune.
Not for long, not for long.
The shell has broken.
The albumen’s leaking out, clear.
That slimy stuff isn’t black at all.
My heart sings out a mournful call.
And throughout all this, through it all,
I wish and wait. I want to Fall.
He
climbed to my branch. It creaked woefully under our weight. He’d hauled himself up onto the outside edge of the branch instead of squeezing between the trunk and me. We were near to stressing the wood beyond its limits. A few cracking sounds came from it, but neither of us was bothered by that.
It felt as though Thom had pried me open and wrapped his hand around my heart, and found a spot where it had a piece missing. Not the actual missing piece where the car metal had sheared the muscle, but the missing part that kept me isolated. I wasn’t isolated now. He’d drawn words from the air around us and given voice to my pain. Because it was his pain, too. As I realized this, Thom spoke again.
He whispered, “We could, you know.”
We both gazed down at the ground. It was far enough away. We studied it, considering, for some time.
“Almost did back at the city,” I murmured.
Admitting this brought unexpected terror down on me. It descended like chunks of ice, raining and pummeling, then falling away, leaving a sting. It made me nervous. My mouth ran on ahead before I could catch it.
“I was ready. Up high, on the 37th story. I’d made my choice. I was ready. I was ready and I was going to.” Why was I telling him this?
“And then?”
I caught up to my mouth and shook my head. “You?”
A snap rang out from where our branch joined the tree. The branch’s sag was no longer only due to our weight. It had started to peel away from the tree’s trunk, just a small tear.
Thom looked at his hands. “The gun jammed. Only time that’s ever happened to me, a gun failing to fire.” Then, quieter, “I’ve never told anyone about it. No one’s ever asked, not ever. I don’t want anyone else to know.”
He must’ve had that terror stirring in himself as well after exposing this.
“I’m glad it jammed,” I told him.
He didn’t look up from his hands. Bits of bark stuck to the pitch on them. I patted a sticky, barky, bare palm against one of his, pushing them together firmly and peeling them apart, repeatedly. A diversion.
“Why didn’t you jump?” he eventually asked.
“Eric,” I said, as if that were explanation enough. It wasn’t and I knew it. “We’d never even spoken to each other before. He called out to me, as I rose up on my toes to dive from the building.”
“Did he know?”
My hand was shaking as I patted it down onto Thom’s again. This time, he wrapped his fingers around it and held on.
“I don’t think so. No, I’m pretty sure he didn’t,” I mumbled.
“Then how’d he stop you?”
“He named me.”
Thom looked up to the sky and closed his eyes. I shifted slightly and the branch ripped a little more. I looked down at the ground.
“Before the gun jammed?” I asked, but he couldn’t Tell Of just then. He shook his head.
We sat quietly for a few minutes. The tree swayed, the branch cracked, and we gazed at the sky and then gazed at the ground.
“Well?” I asked him. How would we descend?
“I still want to Fall,” he admitted.
“Me too.”
We climbed down.
I pulled out the WD-40 and we cleaned pitch from our skin.
“Nice trick,” Thom said.
I scrunched my clean toes into the grass as he wiped resin from my hair.
Thom told Eric about what I said. It wasn’t a violation of trust; I’d wanted to tell Eric and hadn’t known how to. Thom had known, though. He still didn’t tell anyone else about the gun, and I didn’t, either.
“Almost lost you in the city?” Eric said, as we sat on the bleachers of a deserted football field. “Out on that gargoyle?”
“Almost.”
He knew I wasn’t going to talk about that further, so Eric changed the subject to our Rotter Containment Plan. Rotters are like sheep. They can easily be led or herded, especially if tempted by something they find appealing, like a healthy live body.
We’d found and prepared a large, already-fenced area. We referred to the location simply as “the paddock.” The fencing was rough-hewn wood with barbed wire. It would be suitable for containing a herd of deadstock. It was a couple of acres wide, and several acres long. It was huge. Someone had done a lot of work to fence in such a large area.
“Still doesn’t solve the problem of how to deal with a swarm once we get them contained,” Eric commented, then he fell silent again.
“Containing them is a big step, though,” I said. “Remember that military outpost we flew to?”
“Yeah. You said things there went sour pretty fast.”
“Truth. I’d only been there for two days when a swarm of rotters found the place. It was chaos. All those soldiers couldn’t fight them off. There were just too many. If they couldn’t hold out with all those trained gunmen, there’s no way our camp would survive such a situation. If we can contain them, though, that’d buy us time to finish them off.”
I stood and took aim. My throwing knife flew into a rotter’s head about twenty feet away. I repeated the action. Another rotter fell. I sat and set the knives aside, then leaned on one of the sexiest arms I’ve ever encountered. I rubbed my cheek against perfectly shaped muscles. Eric looked mired in his thoughts again.
“Hmm?” I hummed lightly, encouraging him to share. When Eric got snagged on a thought, he couldn’t let it go. Something had clearly snared him.
Intending to be direct, Eric asked, “Did your stepfather ever…?” He lost the question. It broke from the mold he’d tried to force it into. “Or at a Program…?” he tried instead, but got stuck again. “With you?”
“He liked boys,” I answered, finally guessing at his direction.
Eric nodded. This was what he’d been at.
I spoke on, “He had a rule about females. We were in the Programs for beatings only, until we turned sixteen. I won’t claim to understand my stepfather’s rules. They seemed so random. Probably something Biblical.”
“So he didn’t… you didn’t…?” Eric still couldn’t finish the question.
“He didn’t with any of the girls. At sixteen, though, a girl became fair game for the audiences. He had auctions for who could break her in, up to who got to kill her. When Officer Bissett got me out of the hospital, my sixteenth birthday was just over three weeks away. My auctions had already been held.”
Eric stood and reached for the knives. He took aim and then threw at another rotter who was slowly staggering our way. The rotter sank to the ground. Eric trotted onto the field and retrieved the throwing knives.
I closed my eyes and listened to Eric sit back down as I tried to block out thoughts of my sister, Rose. The way she had been broken in, the way she had gone out. Days of torture. They’d raped her repeatedly, in every way they could think up. They knocked out her teeth so she couldn’t bite them when they shoved their dicks in her mouth. They cut out her tongue, and they sewed her eyes shut. In the end, they disemboweled her and watched her die while intestines flopped down her legs, across her ankles, and onto the floor. I remember seeing tremors take over her hands and then her arms as the torture had begun, and how the shaking spread throughout her body, and how she kept shaking all through it. Now all I could see was one of her hands, shaking, bloody, and burned. Some bodies can take so much abuse.
“Come back,” Eric requested.
I opened my faulty eyes and his were just inches away.
I couldn’t remember Rose’s favorite color.
“Okay,” he said, kissing me lightly.
Thom and I were sitting in a tall spruce, watching the ground again. We were on a stronger branch this day, and closer to the trunk. We hadn’t come up here to jump. We just wanted to feel like maybe we could Fall. Just maybe.
Thinking of his impromptu poem when we were back in the other tree, I pointed to a tall pine ten yards away. Thom studied it. Its candelabra branches spread gracefully away from the trunk. It would have been beautiful, but it was ruined by bli
ght. The bark was shredded and pulpy wood was exposed. I felt like that tree.
I spoke softly to Thom:
I’m a plague that creeps in among the branches.
They shed bark, peeling it away like sunburned skin.
I desecrate the trunks, sloughing off piece by miserable piece.
The trees will all die. There is no saving them.
Thom shook his head once. He continued to gaze out at the pine, committing the words to memory.
I saw a rotter abruptly turn away from a stand of thick blue spruces once, when I was on Post Watch. Well, I wasn’t on Post Watch. I’d been hanging out with Thom while he was on Post Watch.
I pointed it out to Thom, and set off to check what was in the trees there. I kept looking up to Thom for signals about which way to go. Everything looks different from far away, so when I got close, it was hard to see anything at all of what I’d seen when I was by Thom’s side. He gestured, pushing both palms forward, to indicate I was in the right spot. I examined the trees. There wasn’t anything scary in there. I could see a webworm infestation on an apple tree (caterpillar webs had transformed it into what looked like a Halloween enthusiast’s overzealous decorating job), and there was slime from a bacterial wetwood infection on an oak next to the spruces. I sniffed, but couldn’t smell anything strange. I didn’t hear anything ominous, couldn’t taste anything on the breeze.
Did the rotter not like the smell of the spruce trees? Were those sharp, rollable sprills somehow noxious when nothing else seemed to be? Don’t be dumb, Kit. If that were the case I would’ve seen this happen before. There was something useful in this, but I couldn’t pinpoint what it was. I collected a bit of caterpillar web in a plastic baggie—it would go in a glass jar back at the lean-to. I also collected a sample of the slime in a tiny glass vial and then I turned my thoughts from it all, knowing it would stay tucked away in my brain until it made sense, confident my mind would continue working at the problem even when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it.
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 20