I return his gaze steadily, and somehow being with Doyle fills me with a strength and confidence that didn’t come naturally to me. I think of Charisse, and I know I’m willing to die for her (or any other pretty girl who gives me the time of day). But she’s more special than any of the others.
When the elevator door opens onto the fourth floor of Infinity Mall, I’m immediately struck by the disco feel going on here. Strange lights had been set up that melted from yellow to red to purple to green to blue and then back to yellow. And they’re all synching differently so that colors wash over the face of the stoic soldier standing there, giving him an alien countenance.
He glances at Doyle, then at me, and says, “How’s it goin’, fellas?”
“It just got better,” Doyle says to him, chuckling.
The guy laughs, and then Doyle walks past him toward a wall of mirrors with a mirrored door set in the middle.
I look down the atrium, seeing the guards stationed on each floor, and imagine a firefight with them. There is probably no way we can shoot our way out of here if we’re discovered. But there must be stairwells for fire exits if we need to escape. I want to tell Doyle that we should look for these, but I don’t want the guard to notice me whispering so I hold that thought and follow Doyle to the door.
He pulls it open and smoke billows out. Cigarettes mixed with other odors. Definitely marijuana. I recognize it from my college dorm days, when neighbors with towels under their doors tried to hide the scent. But it wafted potently into the hallway no matter what they tried, and often security was called to investigate.
There are other odors here too, ones I don’t recognize.
The room beyond the mirror door looks like an opium den in a Chinese gangster film. Mirrors line the walls inside, reflecting bodies in various states of undress having sex or lounging around on plush couches and beds. The large room holds over thirty people, and aside from some ambient background music, the prevalent sounds are lusty moaning.
I freeze and stare. It’s beyond my comprehension how we just walked in on this. The mirrors on every wall make it look like infinite people having sex, on and on and on, pumping to eternity. My first thought is envy, some dim recess in my brain wondering if I should join this tribe and just live happily ever after in this hedonistic wonderland.
Then a feeling of horror overtakes me and I look around for Charisse.
A woman sitting by herself catches my eye and beckons to me from her couch. She’s naked except for a necklace around her belly glinting in the disco lights. She’s beautiful, but I shake my head no and look away.
Thankfully, Charisse isn’t here. I don’t know what I’d do if she was. It’s the ugliest thing I can think of, seeing her fucking some scumbag in this whore house.
This makes me pause. “Doyle,” I say quietly. He turns. “What the hell intelligence did you gather to make you think Charisse would be here?”
Doyle smiles. “Oh, she’s here alright. Mav keeps his whores separated from the rest of the population now. Down there, it’s all families and regular life. Up here, it’s the paradise city, just for soldiers and higher-ranked officials.”
“Charisse isn’t a whore,” I snap back.
Doyle laughs. “Come on, Sam, you know I meant because of Mavmart. I’ve got a feeling she’s up here. I’ve been tracking their radios for the last two weeks.”
Like some tragically broken-hearted marionette, I follow Doyle through the pathway between beds toward another door. A guy laying around on a mattress with his flaccid cock in full view lurches upright and points at me. “I know you!” he exclaims.
I don’t recognize the guy at all.
Doyle stops in front of the bed, and for a moment, I think he’s going to break the guy’s neck or something. Instead, he just bends down and growls, “Mind your own fuckin’ business, or there’s gonna be trouble. Do I make myself clear?”
The guy stares in confusion for a minute, but then nods. He saw death in Doyle’s eyes, the same way I did when I was trying to sneak out of the fire station to avoid the attack on Mavmart.
I look at the guy’s face, but there’s nothing familiar about him. Glad I have Doyle with me, because if I was alone, I would’ve panicked there.
Doyle opens the door into a hallway lit with red lights, and at this point, I’m just panicking inside. If he’s right, and Charisse is here, it’s going to crush me.
Curtains line this hallway, spaced every ten feet, and Doyle casually saunters down, dipping his head through each curtain, then moving on to the next.
I don’t bother to look in any of them. I don’t want to see what’s there.
He stops at the seventh curtain and yanks it aside, then turns to me with knowing eyes that say I told you so.
I can’t bring myself to walk to the doorway. I stand frozen for a long time.
“Come on,” he says.
And I do. I look into the room, and in the dimness, I see her flawless beauty lying naked on a queen-sized bed. Light washes over her from a flat screen television mounted to the wall, but no sound comes from it.
Thankfully, Charisse is alone.
She doesn’t notice us. She seems half-asleep, staring through heavy lids at the screen.
“Charisse!” I gasp, rushing forward.
She jolts out of her reverie and at first recoils from my advances.
“Are you okay?” I ask her, reaching out to cradle her face.
She violently shoves my hands away. “Who the fuck are you?” she asks, confused.
And I become quicksand, a speck of dirt, a puddle of soda on the ground that makes her shoe suddenly sticky.
I stare at her dumbfounded. Not an ounce of recognition registers in her eyes. Finally, I speak. “I’m Sam,” I whisper.
“Sam,” she echoes.
“Yes,” I say.
“Sam I am,” she says, giggling. “Do you want green eggs and ham?” She bursts out laughing.
“Charisse, I came to rescue you,” I tell her, feeling utterly lame. This isn’t at all how this moment was supposed to go.
“From what?”
I don’t know this person at all. It’s crystal clear and I slump back onto my butt on the edge of the bed. I’m nobody to her. I’d never been anything or anyone.
“Do you remember me at all?” My voice comes out of me numbly, like a trigonometry teacher droning on about sign and cosign. “I met you in Walmart; you took me to the bathroom and told me to take you away from Mav. You were a sex slave, and pregnant, and you begged me to take you away. You asked me to save you and be yours forever.”
“Oh, you!” she says. “Yes, I remember you!” She laughs, reaches out her hands and grabs my face. “You sweet, silly boy, you look so scruffy now. Yes, I remember. I didn’t think you’d come back for me. I wanted you to sneak me out. I was pregnant and miserable. Oh my God, you wouldn’t believe how shitty things were.” She smiles and looks at me with those eyes. “Yes, of course, I remember now.”
I melt beneath her fingers and her eyes, and my heart trembles with hope.
“I’m not pregnant anymore,” she says. “Thank God I had a miscarriage.” She giggles. “It’s not as bad as everyone makes it out to be. And this place, it’s like paradise here.”
My stomach’s in knots. I’d been living my entire life for this floozie, and she’s laughing in my face? Oh Sam, you complete jackass! I don’t understand her mocking eyes. I ask, “Charisse, are you on some kind of drug right now?”
She laughs. “Duh. Aren’t you?”
“No.”
“What are you doing here?” she says.
“I came to save you. I’m here to get you out of here, to make a better life for us. And I’ve got a plan, too.”
“Oh, Sam,” she says. “That’s so sweet. But I’m happy now, living every day, just doing whatever I want. Mostly shopping and fucking and getting high. Mav made a good life for us, after all--he’s building us girls luxury suites in the Bon Ton. We’re practically c
elebrities here.”
I close my eyes and clutch my head. All that I’ve been through, all of these weeks and struggling and dreaming of this woman who had seemed to love me. And now this sick joke, this fucked-up ridiculous punchline. I was George McFly, the loser from the comic shop, some worthless nobody waiting for a one-hit wonder. And Charisse would rather live as some drugged-out whore than be with me.
“Don’t take it personally, Sam,” Doyle says from the doorway.
Charisse looks up, as if noticing him for the first time.
“Doyle!” she squeals, throwing her arms wide like he’s her best friend. “I haven’t seen you in days! You guys wanna party?” She reaches out to my face again, but I smack her hand away.
Realization dawns slowly. I don’t want to believe it. I try to assemble the confusion into anything else except the facts unfolding in front of my eyes, but I can’t. The truth is obvious. Doyle lied his ass off to me. I’m not Sam anymore. I’m a seething inferno. My eyes turning to take in Doyle, volcanic magma rising inside of me as I see his shit-eating grin. I have the strength of ten men inside as I lunge forward and tear him apart with my bare hands.
Except when I lunge, Doyle kicks me hard in the solar plexus and I crumple to the ground, gasping for breath. He grabs me by my Jew mane and wrenches my head up.
“Oh my God!” Charisse gasps. “Doyle, don’t--”
His knee knocks my jaw into next week.
“Sorry, Charisse,” Doyle says. “But Mav wants to have a word with this turncoat piece of shit.”
I go for my gun, but Doyle disarms me easily, then drags me across the floor and out of Charisse’s room. That’s when I catch sight of Doyle’s ID badge again, and realize the guy who let us onto the elevator was the same scraggly bearded guy on Doyle’s ID card.
Chapter 59: Then
Days passed, and I tried to hang out with the guys and get to know them better. No one wanted to go with me back to Hasbro and Ma’Sheea.
“It’s better here. The city was infested and it will have only gotten worse. You can’t risk your life for people you just met,” was Army Dave’s response.
He’d taken a liking to me, but acted in almost a paternal way, like I was just a dumb kid.
I got drunk one night; they taught me poker while we laughed and forgot about our troubles.
Mostly, I just sat in the office and scribbled in my notebook, writing as much as I could to stay out of my head. Sometimes I sat and stared out the window and looked at the trees and the house across the street. It was like a window into the past--if you stared long enough, everything looked normal. There weren’t many zombies around here, and no sign of struggle.
The grass had gotten long and untended, but that just made it look like some idyllic house in the country.
Army Dave came in one day and said, “You still writing your book?”
“Yeah.”
“Can I read it?”
“Uhhh.” That was the last thing I wanted.
“Come on, what’s it matter if I like it or not?”
“It’s just really personal.”
“So you’re writing a book that you don’t want anyone to read?”
I laughed. “I guess I want people to read it after I’m dead.”
Dave laughed at that too. “How about one page?”
“Okay.”
“The zombie apocalypse started exactly two months ago,” he read aloud. “And it started exactly where you’d expect it to, on the internet. Or more to the point, on Facebook.” He laughed. “What do you mean it started on Facebook? It started in New York City, that’s what the television said.”
“I’m just trying to be funny,” I explained. “Because everyone was a Facebook zombie, and then real zombies showed up.”
“Oh, that’s pretty good,” he said.
“Lemme see that. You gave me an idea,” I told him.
I scribbled out ‘the internet’ on the first line and wrote in ‘television,’ so that it read ‘It started exactly where you’d expect it to, on television.’
“Hey, cool man, I influenced your book!” he said proudly.
“Yes, you did. You can be my editor.”
After this, Dave told everyone he was helping to edit my book, and it became a joke among the guys. But somehow they accepted me more once he had.
Army Dave started teaching me some hand-to-hand fighting moves and how to use different weapons. I felt like Veronica would be proud, like I was actually learning some man skills.
We spent most of our days talking about women, and how we needed to find some, and wondering where other survivors would be hanging out. We scouted a lot, hoping to find survivors, but mostly looking for canned goods, rice, and pasta in the surrounding neighborhoods, as well as other supplies.
After a week, we’d stockpiled a gigantic food and beer pantry, eight gas generators and barrels of gasoline with fuel stabilizer in them, power tools galore, as well as hand-to-hand weapons and guns. The other guys actually went out one day armed with chainsaws because, Gary said, this was “a man’s bucket list necessity.” I opted to stay in and write like the pussy they saw me as.
Once we had enough gear to survive the winter, things relaxed and we watching movies on the fire station DVD player. Mostly action films, the types I wouldn’t usually watch. They actually had World War Z on the shelf, so we watched that one. That’s one film that took on a new, cringe-worthy meaning.
“At least there’s no fast zombies,” Brock said during the film, when hordes of them were chasing Brad Pitt.
“Holy fuck, none of us would survive if they ran like that!” Gary replied.
“Speak for yourselves,” Doyle said. “I’d survive just fine.”
“I would, too,” Army Dave said.
Doyle snorted. “Just ‘cuz you were in the army doesn’t mean shit.”
“Yeah, yeah, just cuz you’re a redneck with a bunch of guns doesn’t mean nothin’ either,” Dave retorted.
I joined in the ball busting once in a while, but for the most part, I was still the weird eccentric guy who’d never learned any useful life skills.
One day, we took a fishing trip to Nine Mile Creek nearby, and I got blasted by all of them for the fact that I’d never learned to fish.
It was actually Doyle who taught me how to catch and release the line, and then he taught me the pace to reel.
“If you tug it a little and make it flutter, it looks like a wounded fish,” Doyle said.
“If you tug it a lot, you’ll cum all over Doyle!” Army Dave replied, cracking everyone up.
On the trip back to the fire station, we passed the Walmart on Genesee Street and noticed it was all lit up. The power had been out for weeks, but someone had the lights going here.
“We should check it out,” Dave said.
“Not now,” Doyle said. “Could be hostiles.”
“At least they’re not shooting at us,” Stan said. “Could be help in there.”
“Could be vagina,” Dave said.
“Later,” Doyle said. “After we recon the area.”
Chapter 60: Now
Doyle drags me out of the makeshift brothel on the fourth floor, then removes my weapons and tosses them over the atrium railing. Except the knife strapped to my calf--he missed that one.
Charisse follows us, screaming curses at Doyle, which just seems to provoke him.
For instance: “Doyle, stop it!”
WHAM! His fist thunks into my stomach. I wasn’t even doing anything but scrambling along trying to keep up with his grip on my hair.
That happens a few times, and thankfully, Charisse stops trying to save me. My face is bruised and blood oozes from my nose. My chest wound feels like I’d been shot again from all the hammering Doyle did on my stomach, and there’s a bloodstain on my shirt where it must’ve opened up.
At the elevator door, I manage to gasp, “Doyle, what the fuck are you doing?”
WHAM! Doyle’s fist smashes against my temple
.
“Mav is a total dickhead!” I remind him.
WHAM! Knee to the gut juddering unfathomable agony through my breastbone. Doyle drags me into the elevator, and shoves Charisse back when she tries to follow us. I try to grab my calf knife, but every time I try to get my balance, he yanks me stumbling in another direction.
I bide my time. I have to pull the knife and stab him in the heart in one clean motion.
The elevator sounds a bing, and we’re on the sixth floor—the top floor of the Skydeck. I’d never set foot here before, but always wondered what it was like.
A lush blue carpet covers the floor, and Doyle yanks me stumbling across it to an open area full of people where I finally lay eyes on Mavreides again. He looks different, and I can’t place why. Then I realize: his neck beard is groomed. Now he looks like the Burger King with his neatly trimmed golden beard.
I hate this guy. And I’m going to die here. I can only stab one of them with my knife--should it be Doyle or Mav? It has to be Mav. He’s by far the greater evil. I decide that all I need is enough of a beating to get close to him, then pull out my knife and jam it into his throat.
That isn’t possible now, because he sits fifteen feet away at a fold-out table adorned with a plate of food and a few bottles of wine like he wants to be Caligula.
“At long last, we have Charisse’s boyfriend!” Mav claps his hands together gleefully. “You know, I’ve been waiting for you to show up here to save the poor, forgotten princess whore. It’s such a good story, you know!”
“Look, you win,” I say to Doyle. “Fuckin’ let go already. You got me. I’m done.”
Looking around, I see Gary and Army Dave hanging out amongst Mav’s black-shirted groupies. I stare at them, but they won’t return my gaze. Dave is slightly more comfortable glancing at my bloodied up face than Gary is, and I see sympathy in his eyes.
At this moment, a stairwell exit door bursts open and Charisse runs out. She’s wearing a robe, but the belt has slipped and I can see her pubes beneath the ties.
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