She snorted and replied, “All these guys are such total assholes, you mean? ‘Cuz that’s how I see them. Girls like a guy who’s nice to them, and you’re nice. I can see it in you. Just be you, okay?”
She was giving me these eyes, unblinking black irises in the shadows, looking right into my soul. I wanted to kiss her, and I felt like an idiot, and I felt like she wanted me to kiss her as well. But I couldn’t because I was impaled on those eyes.
“You’re lacking confidence,” she said. “But it’s not because you’re incapable. It’s just ‘cuz you’re different from all the assholes. I totally see you for who you are.”
I stared, dumbfounded at this angelic being. I knew she could see everything in my head, but I still couldn’t move. Kiss her, kiss her, you stupid chickenshit, my mind said. Instead, my mouth just opened and blurted out, “Girls like assholes. They definitely don’t like me.”
“This girl likes you,” she said in the most matter-of-fact tone. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
I looked wildly around, realizing I’d been making bad eye contact the whole time, my eyes lolling in my head like some broken doll. Then I filled the awkward silence with a shitty nervous chuckle, telepathically pleading for her to kiss me instead of making me do it. I thought of asking her if it was okay for me to kiss her, but I’d done that lame line on girls before and the thought of using it on Charisse horrified me.
My mind played a little movie of her rejecting me, telling the other girls, watching them all giggling together and looking at me, then whispering to the men, until the whole dinner became this humiliating moment where they saw me for the fool I was. Finally, I mustered up enough cowardice to say, “This girl doesn’t know me.”
Without missing a beat, she said, “Ooh, are you a man of mystery?” Coy. Batting me around.
“Uh no, not really. I’m not running from a shadowy past or anything interesting. I was a college professor and a gaming nerd,” I said. “My super power was being totally invisible to women.”
Charisse snorted a laugh. “Sorry,” she said, her hand like a Vulcan mind meld on my arm as she tenderly caressed my bicep with a touch worth a thousand words. “It’s just funny.” She giggled some more. “I just pictured a bunch of kids sitting in your classroom, and the girls can hear you talking, and they’re all like ‘who is that’ because they can’t see you!”
I laughed at that, wracking my brain for a clever response. A sawblade in the distance beat me to it, shrilling to life loudly and breaking the moment. I looked where it was coming from and saw lights on way back there, glowing on the ceiling and beyond the racks in the far back corner. I then made a questioning face at her, as if to ask what was going on there, like I gave a shit. At this point, anything to distract from the terrifying gravity that was pulling me toward this woman who couldn’t possibly want to kiss me.
Charisse gave me an awkward smile, probably a pity smile because I had failed to show her any semblance of being a man. She turned and continued as I followed in silence past a few more registers. “What are they building back there?” I asked.
“Bedrooms,” she said. “We’ve got enough bunks for us. But we expect more people eventually. Maybe even you guys, if you get your shit together.”
I mulled that over, and though I am generally a kiss-ass when talking to women, for some reason I was just buzzed enough from the beer to snark back, “Oh, you mean if we collect enough women for admission to Mavmart?”
Charisse stopped. We were in front of register 18. “There’s the bathroom,” she said, shining the light on the customer restrooms.
“I wasn’t trying to be a dick,” I said. “It just seems weird that humans would turn other humans away.”
“No, I know,” she said. For a minute, the silence was stark. The dull hum of conversation from the dining area floated in the disembodied silence. Then a power saw shrieked for a few seconds. “I don’t like it here,” Charisse said, almost a whisper, as if we were being monitored. She looked back the way we’d come, scanning the darkness as if we’d been followed.
I didn’t like Mavreides at all and didn’t think I would like being a part of their gang. Charisse turned and looked at me. Her flashlight was shining on the floor, reflecting upward and casting phantasmagoric shadows on her face and most likely mine as well. My nose is like a homunculus, so I’m sure my shadow-self resembled Picasso’s Cubism period.
“What don’t you like?” I asked.
Charisse stared at me, causing me to look down at the floor where the speckles of color danced in her light. When I looked back up, she was still staring at me. “I’m pregnant,” she said, simply.
Before the apocalypse, when a woman announced pregnancy, it was a statement filled with joy. In this case, it was stoic and sober.
“I bet you’ll be a great mom,” I said, meaning it sincerely while my insides crashed and burned.
“I don’t even know who the father is,” she said.
I was stunned.
Then, it suddenly made sense. Of course, she was looking at me and paying attention to me because she’s just some slut! There was nothing special about her noticing me; she just liked getting attention, like some cliché teenage bitch.
Charisse must’ve caught my expression. “Not like that—Mav makes us do it,” she whispered. “At first, it was just so that we’ll reproduce. That was their logic. But a few of us are pregnant now, and still, we have to take care of the men because they’re taking care of us. And we have to contribute to the tribe. That’s how it is here. Like Biblical times, Mav says.” She let out a choked whimper. “We’re supposed to be grateful to them. It’s horrible, Sam. Please…” That last word was so quiet and desperate. “Please get me out of here.” Her fingernails dug into my arm as she looked in my eyes. “I know you’re not like the others.” Her eyes were in shadow, but they stung me anyway.
And then she leaned forward and pressed her lips on mine, and their infinite softness melted into every corner of my being. Nothing on earth is softer than the lips of a woman. Charisse gently sucked my bottom lip between hers and held it a moment, then pulled away. I could see the plea in her brown eyes, even in the dark. I could feel her saliva on my lip, still wet, with faint air currents moving across it. I adjusted my crotch, blushing furiously.
Charisse caught the motion, her eyes flicking down and then back up at me. “It’s okay,” she said, smirking shyly. “You don’t have to be embarrassed. It’s natural.”
“What are we supposed to do?” I whispered back, looking wildly around as if the Gestapo would bust in on us. There was no one, nothing, just racks of clothes hanging inert.
“I don’t know,” she whispered back. “Take me away right now, we can slip out the back entrance and just…run!”
“Is there a way?”
“Yes, we can just slip through the door in the auto shop, or in the loading docks. The doors aren’t guarded.”
I considered this, smelling the sweet perfume of her body, feeling her softness flooding through her fingers into mine, knowing this could be every night of my life. I would never be lonely again, I would have this woman, and we could find sanctuary somewhere and just forget the plague, the world, the whole thing. I could wake up every day and kiss her, pick vegetables from the garden, collect eggs from our chickens, and make breakfast for us and our child. It was the most beautiful dream, like a painting by Odd Nerdrum I’d once loved. It showed a little shack, with a naked man climbing out of bed holding a rifle to go hunt, and a woman and baby sleeping on a pile of furs. It looked like a perfect life to me when I’d seen it, just being a hunter gatherer with nothing else to do.
But the problem with running away with Charisse is that Mav took our guns. We wouldn’t get twenty feet out the door without being mobbed by zombies in the darkness.
“No way,” I said. “That’s suicide. There’s snipers and zombies. Where would we run? What would we do?” These words coming out of my mouth were not mine--I was cutting apart
my own beautiful dream and I was helpless to stop, because somewhere in these words lived sense.
Charisse wept softly. Her knees buckled and I took hold of arms. “Stop it!” I said. She whimpered as tears poured out of her eyes and her body shook like some seizure had gripped her. “Charisse, you are so special, stop it! You have no idea how touched I am that you…” I trailed off, realizing how stupid I sounded saying these things to a woman I’d only known eighteen minutes.
It took her infinite moments to compose herself. I looked wildly around, expecting some shotgun-toting guard to step out of the clothes racks and confront me. But nothing happened. She calmed down, squeezed my arm again, and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry; this is horrible,” I said.
“Yes, but…you’re right. What can you do?” She looked in my eyes, and her eye makeup ran with her tears onto her cheeks.
“I don’t know what we can do,” I said. “But I’ll get you out, one way or another. We can’t just run out, though.”
She pushed her entire body against me, and it felt soft and foreign and reassuring. Charisse was by far the most beautiful woman who had ever touched me. She seemed to be quivering, ever so slightly, and I could feel how much she needed to be held. And how much I did, as well. It was a long embrace, but it was plagued with the awareness that it was going to end, that the others were waiting.
“Let me think about this,” I said, with a confidence that also felt foreign to me. “I’m sure I can come up with a plan. If we can get in here and be part of their gang, then it will be easy to sneak away with you.”
She shook her head violently. “They won’t let you. They lure people here, but they only want more women. They kill off most of the men. Anyone who doesn’t have some skill, something useful to offer. Two of the girls here had their husbands butchered by Mav.”
“He did that?” I was stunned. “In front of them?”
“No, he makes it look like an accident.”
“Maybe it really was an accident.”
“It’s not an accident, Sam. He sends the undesirables out foraging with Cavelli and his closest guys, and they all get bit. No one else is ever there to witness.”
I sighed. “This is really a heavy allegation to level against the guy. Maybe it’s just the weak ones who always get bit.”
Charisse puts her hands on my shoulders. “Listen, Sam, every time people join the group, I always know which ones will die on the first outing. We all know. Anyone who insults Mav, or who doesn’t want to share their women, he just makes them disappear. Same with weak guys; he gets rid of them because it’s too many mouths to feed. Cavelli pretty much admitted this when he was drunk on top of me one night. Mav only wants soldiers, and he doesn’t want extra mouths to feed. Notice there’s no elderly here?”
“He was gonna have Cavelli take me to the bathroom,” I said, realizing the implications. “Does that mean he was gonna kill me?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “That was weird. Did you do something to piss Mav off?”
I remembered my first conversation with Mav. “Yeah, I guess I did.” This jarred me as I realized the whole dinner was some kind of diabolical trap. They were sniffing our asses like a fraternity rush party to see who to keep and who to kill. I had not only insulted Mav, but I was also a weakling. “But…” My word hung in the air. I wanted to mention that conversation they were just having about their churches, but then it was crystal clear: what kind of church-going humans would turn away anyone in this situation? Bad ones. Still, I couldn’t grasp this. There was a sick sense to it. But to imagine real human beings—that geek Mavreides—actually murdering us?
Charisse choked out a sob. “Sam, I mean it. You aren’t safe. I don’t think he would’ve had Cavelli kill you when your men are here, but who knows what goes on in that sick fuck’s mind.” She whimpered under her breath. “In bed… he likes to hurt us and humiliate us. He’s evil, Sam. You have to believe me.” Her voice got louder as her emotions flared.
“Sssshhh,” I said. “They’ll hear us.”
She looked up with pleading eyes. “Please—I see you, Sam. I know you’re different. Please, help me! We can have a real life together.” She looked at me with pleading eyes and I knew she was telling the truth. “Sam, if they let you guys join, you’ll be sent out with Cavelli on the first mission, and you won’t come back. You have to believe me.”
There’s a moment in every unlikely hero film, where the ordinary guy suddenly takes on a responsibility that any viewer knows he cannot handle. This was my Woody Allen ‘Sleeper’ moment.
The problem is that those are movies designed to appeal to nerds with no self-esteem. And I am a nerd with no self-esteem, who’s suddenly thrust into this position in real life. It’s preposterous to agree to it. Chance of survival is zero. And yet, if you are me, or any guy like me, then you simply must agree to it. There’s no room for dissent. The Woody Allen inside of you suddenly begins flexing Hulk muscles you don’t have, and since you’ve watched too many movies about outnumbered weaklings triumphing over adversity, and your libido is pumping testosterone into your bloodstream, you just whisper, “Okay, I’ll do it.”
The unwilling, unlikely hero, has suddenly been made, and I am Willow Ufgood.
Except the rational hero also knows that if he tries this, he will wind up dead. His agreement is not an actual assent, but a placation. Let the female heroine believe I will rescue her, so that I may slip away peacefully with my gang, and find some easier females to rescue. Perhaps a troupe of two men guarding eight concubines would be preferred?
But I am not a rational hero. I was lost in her eyes, in love with everything about Charisse. I knew I was pledging my measly, worthless life to that of her and her child. I wanted to kiss her again, but I felt shy and hesitated.
She saw that, too and leaned in and gave me a kiss I could never forget, the softest melding of lips, her tongue gently slipping into my mouth and caressing mine, her hands sliding down my waist, cradling my butt and pulling my crotch against hers so our bodies just blended together seamlessly in that instant while everything sensible inside me malfunctioned. I just stopped being me for a few seconds; it was paradise.
She pulled away and shined the light so we could see each other’s faces. “Thank you,” she said, her eyes moist. She was looking at me like no one ever had, like she could see me, like I was a real man and she admired me. Her eyes traced along my face, taking in my cheeks and nose and mouth, but her breathless dreamy expression never changed. As if I was the most handsome, powerful man she had ever laid eyes on. Her expression was so intense it made me feel stronger.
“Your mascara is running; you better fix it so Mav doesn’t notice,” I told her.
She laughed. “I’m not wearing mascara?” She said it like a question.
“The raccoon stuff,” I said. “What’s it called?”
“Eyeliner,” she said, giggling and wiping under her eyes with her fingers. “It’s funny to me that guys don’t know these things. I’ve been wearing it since I was eight; it’s just such a part of my world.”
For a moment, it felt like everything was back to normal, and we were on a romantic Hollywood date.
“Or used to be a part of my world,” she added.
“Do they make you put it on now?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “They don’t care about anything except fucking us…” She trailed off. “We all wear it, though. It’s comforting. We feel like little girls together, and strangely, we all get along. Normally, when you put a bunch of girls together, it’s a bunch of backstabbing. We are like sisters being raised in captivity.”
I reached up and smoothed a strand of hair away that had gotten stuck in her mouth. She brightened and looked at me, her eyes shadowed but still beautiful. “Mascara goes on your eyelashes, silly,” she said, giving me another flawless smile that made me feel so strong and courageous. It was so bright I had to look away, lest she notice I was prematurely in l
ove with her. How is it that a woman can do this to me?
“You better go,” she said.
I pulled awkwardly away from her and started walking into the bathroom, then realized it was pitch black. I stopped in the doorway. “Um, I guess you have to come in the men’s room with me, since there’s no light.”
“Oh right,” she said, following me into the room.
I stood at the urinal, while she held the light toward me.
“Don’t worry, I’m not looking,” she said.
“Does it feel weird for you to be in the men’s room?” I said.
“Guys are a lot weirder about that stuff than girls. Even before this happened, I would just use the men’s room if the girl’s room was full. Like, at a bar or something. Guys always looked at us weird when we did that, but we’re girls, so it’s okay to use the men’s room.”
“Really? You could just go in the men’s bathroom whenever you wanted? I would never go in the women’s room. I’d be horrified!”
“Well, I mean at bars. But I guess I could’ve done it anywhere, like in a restaurant. Nobody would really care that much I don’t think.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t really get out to bars much. Or anywhere, really.” Saying that felt the same as saying, ‘I’m a total loser,’ so I felt angst rising up again, that self-critical asshole living in my head. Where did that even come from? “Oh wow, I wish I didn’t say that.”
“It’s okay. It’s sweet,” she said. “I hate bar guys. I hate everyone eating at that table out there. I like you because you’re nothing like those men.”
Then my urine spraying into the urinal was the only sound. I looked at her, and she was watching me from behind. My cock surged a little from the excitement. We smiled shyly, then I looked away, and back at her. The enclosed space and mirrors refracted the flashlight so it was pretty lit up in here.
“We’re talking over a piss,” I said.
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