by McBain, Tim
“It’s not actually that deep. Just nicked a spot that bleeds a lot,” he said. “You don’t need stitches or anything.”
Her eyes slid toward him, just enough for a sliver of his face to come into view.
“You know how to do stitches?”
Balancing her hand on his thigh, he dribbled a little alcohol across her finger. It burned the raw flesh, and she couldn’t help but flinch.
“I’ve seen it done a few times.”
“Were your parents doctors or something?”
He didn’t look up as he wrapped gauze around her finger.
“Something like that.”
When he was finished, he and Izzy pulled her up and guided her to the couch, despite her reiteration that she hadn’t fainted and didn’t need their help.
“So this makes us even, right?” he asked, as she settled into the cushions.
She knew it was a joke, and she knew she should thank him, but she scoffed anyway.
“Not even close.”
Baghead
Outskirts of Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 128 days after
The flames wreathed around the edges of porches and roofs, licking along window sills and door jambs. The orange flickers all seemed to sway in unison when the wind blew, shaking, almost disappearing, and then bobbing back to their prior positions like nothing happened.
Vinyl siding melted and wept down onto the bushes below. He couldn’t hear it, not from inside the car on the highway, but Bags imagined the liquefied vinyl sizzled when it hit the branches like droplets of water dancing on top of a hot griddle.
Seeing it somehow made the smell worse. Watching buildings shrivel and peel and disintegrate at the fire’s touch gave the odor a context. It was, he thought, a little like seeing where the sausage was made. No remnant remained of a barbecue smell now. It stank of ruin, of rot and loss and death.
Total destruction. Those were the words that occurred to Baghead as he took these images in. Total fucking destruction.
Whole neighborhoods burned. Subdivisons blackened. Cul-de-sacs turned into rings of fire. Heat shimmered everywhere, bending and wiggling every form and line, smearing reality, like some censor was trying to blur every house’s face to conceal their identities.
“I imagine the wind helped it along quite a bit,” Delfino said.
Baghead nodded.
“Still… Have to wonder how it started,” the driver said. “Isn’t that funny? Even if we’re just passing through, not even slowing down if we can help it, and there’s literally no way the origin will be explained to us, we still have to wonder how it all started.”
Baghead watched smoke spiral out of a broken spot in a circular attic window, a black liquid swirl flowing into the sky, congealing with all the other smoke headed that way.
“We just blow through here, and we can gas up about twenty minutes down the road,” Delfino said. “Would’ve got fuel here, but… Anyway, I’ve got a couple of reserve tanks stocked away that we can tap into. It’s not far.”
Delfino pulled another cigarette out of the tin and lit it.
“Can you even taste that?” Baghead said.
“What?” Delfino said, exhaling smoke. “Of course I can taste it.”
“We’re surrounded by smoke is all. The stench is everywhere. Just seems like a weird time for a cigarette, I guess.”
“That’s true, I suppose. I don’t know, man. I’m addicted.”
He cracked his window, that suction sound filling the car again, and he flicked the ashes away.
A glimmer in the road caught Baghead’s eye as Delfino tended his smoke, an object of some kind shining up from the blacktop. It almost looked like a piece of a fence, but his eyes didn’t have time to focus before they were right on top of it.
The tires thudded over it with a loud pop, a sharp, ominous sound intertwined with the deeper noise that would typically accompany running over an object. The car rocked twice, pitching all of the passengers forward in their seats as the front tires and then the back stab-thumped.
Immediately the Oldsmobile fishtailed.
“What the fuck?” Delfino said, his voice going falsetto.
The cigarette tumbled out of his lip as he said it, falling into his lap.
The Delta 88 skidded then, careening. The brakes screeched. The tires squealed. Delfino wrestled with the wheel.
The car spun twice before settling into a steadier skid.
Centrifugal force bashed Baghead’s shoulder into the door and snapped his head into the window a beat later. The impact knocked him hard enough to slide the eyeholes of his bag out of whack.
Black everywhere. Gravity still rattling his head against the glass. His hands fumbled at the top of the bag, righted the holes, the textured canvas tickling where it slid against the sweat-slicked skin of his forehead.
The ditch ahead looked to be closing on them, a scooped out trench of grass and muck that formed an inevitable landing spot, perhaps a final resting place as well.
Baghead’s hands gripped the dash, fingers splayed and curled like claws, knuckles as white as one of those albino looking fish that never creep out of the darkest depths of the ocean.
Then gravity seemed to drop out for a second, he floated up from his seat, hood lifting from the top of his head, legs just barely touching the upholstery, arms drifting up, his whole body hovering for a long moment, levitating.
And as the weightlessness floated his stomach up toward his neck, made his cheeks go slack and ripple up toward his cheekbones, it occurred to him what the fence looking object in the road must have been. Spikes. They’d driven over a police-style spike strip, popping all four tires most likely.
And then the world jerked the other way. The pitch of the squealing tires changed as well, reaching for some higher note that almost felt impossible like the dramatic peak of some warbling opera song.
An invisible force hit him like a battering ram and flung him down, and with another bang, he was horizontal. The opposite shoulder drove into the center panel of the bench seat first, and then his arm and legs hit a second later, everything limp and loose and powerless and heavy. Half-folded, the weight of his limbs seemed to pile on top of him, their heft intensified for the moment.
Dead weight. That’s what he was. An object that had been at rest and was now thrown down at the whim of outside forces.
And then he remembered the girl in the backseat. Jesus. Hopefully she’d been wearing her seatbelt.
He writhed, propping himself up on an elbow and turning to look back.
Her hand clutched her head near the temple, but her expression didn’t look pained. Blank, mostly, he thought. The seatbelt still holstered her in place, fastened around her waist. She’d be OK, he thought. Maybe a knot on the head or something.
He felt light again and a bit strange to be balancing on hands and knees in the front seat. The car was slowing at last. Somehow still upright, still on the roadway instead of smashed flat in the ditch.
Delfino clung to the wheel even so, knuckles shaking, ropey strands and veins bulging on both forearms. A little blood trickled from the driver’s nose.
With a final squeak and rumble the car stopped, giving all of them one last firm shake like someone trying to get the remnants of the ketchup out of a glass bottle. With a flick of the wrist, the driver killed the engine.
Everything was still for a long moment. Silent. Nobody moved. Nobody even breathed, he thought. Chests all constricted in unison. Everyone waiting. Watching.
Finally Delfino sighed.
“Not cool,” he said.
Deirdre
The Compound
9 years, 56 days after
People streamed everywhere in the market district, a writhing mass of elbows and scowls, all of them fighting for position at the produce booths. The mob was bigger and even more confrontational around the booths with scavenged items.
It was Saturday morning. The day the fresh stock hit the booths from that
week’s scavenging, and the busiest day of all. People went apeshit trying to grip pieces of the past, almost none of them of great use. Novelties such as board games, sports equipment, books, magazines, and comics dominated the action. The most useful stuff – cars, guns, the all too rare functioning machines or devices – went directly into the council’s possession. Everything else got sold.
Clenched fists hoisted money toward the workers behind the booths, and an auctioneer’s voice rose above the crowd somewhere in the distance. The biggest items would go via auction in the next field, where, she was certain, the crowd was ever larger and more hostile. Word had spread through the crowd, their voices hushed with reverence, that two mini-bikes and a four wheeler would be up for auction today, a rare event.
But none of these things concerned her. She saw and dismissed them, eyes flicking right past it all, paying attention to just one thing, one face, one man among so many.
His name was Isaac.
She stalked from booth to booth, trailing her prey. Watching. Waiting. Staying just outside of the fray so she could watch him without losing freedom of mobility.
She was invisible – the only thing she’d ever tried to be, the only thing she’d ever gotten good at. Blending. Hiding in plain sight. Disappearing into the crowd. This was her superpower, maybe.
It occurred to her how easily she could probably get into close quarters with him in this mass of humanity, jab her blade into his guts a couple times, and be gone. She knew just how to do it, to stab and slash in one motion, slitting him wide from just below the belly button up to the sternum, opening his soft belly up in a ragged slash that took just a second, and drifting away just as quickly. It’d all happen below anyone’s gaze, below anyone’s notice. If they could even bring themselves to look away from the blood and whatever guts slid out, the most they’d see would be the back of her hood vanishing into the crowd.
But no. It wasn’t right. Even if it might feel good, it wasn’t right.
She had a plan, and she would stick to it. She had promised herself that.
You could learn a lot about person if you watched them a while with real focus. All of their mannerisms, all of the quirks and ticks of their body language, told a story. She had never realized how much so until now.
He was high-strung, irritable, stressed out. He revealed these facts in his habit of stretching his jaw muscles by opening his mouth as wide as he could in a quick burst, in the restless shift of his weight from foot to foot anytime he stood still for more than fifteen seconds, in the almost perpetual scowl that turned the right corner of his mouth up.
From afar, she thought, some might find him handsome, might mistake his restless posture for confidence and ease with himself, assertiveness. But when she looked into his eyes, she saw only contempt for everything and everyone around him. She saw a shark, those black eyes that glittered with aggression at all times.
Someone in the crowd bumped him just then, a random shoulder jabbing his chest and knocking him back a half-step. He squinted, jaw muscles rippling, nose wrinkling, his eyes looking all the way dead, all the way evil as they locked on the person who’d dared to touch him. He looked subhuman to her in that moment, more beast than man – a snarling, awful thing walking among humanity unnoticed.
Again, she pictured herself wielding the blade. This time the fantasy buried the steel in those eye sockets, and her fist pounded at his skull, worked the knife in and out, savaged his face.
But not just yet. She had to wait. She had to make sure everything was perfect.
It was hard, in some ways, to hold this level of hatred inside, to feel it smoldering in her heart, in her brain, but it also made her feel powerful. This was how she had control, how she could wrestle it away from those who abused it. She didn’t want it, this violent fever that overtook her and put bad thoughts in her head, but it was the only way. She could see that now.
Sometimes a chain of events got going, and there was no stopping it. You either went along with the momentum, finding a way to use it to your advantage, or you got crushed underneath it. She wasn’t going to get crushed.
Before, she thought, when there were Starbucks and McDonald’s on every corner, we could pretend that all of this was better than it really was. We could hide in the comforts all around us, the entertainment bombarding us from every angle. We could stare at screens and look into fantasy worlds where selfless acts were rewarded, where sacrifices could benefit the all.
But that was over. Here only the meanest of the animals survived, and they served only themselves. Any flinch, any hesitation, any moment of softness could be punishable by death. Maybe it was always that way outside of movies and TV shows to some degree. The people in power were never really selfless at all, were they? They took what they wanted and made up their reasons as they went, lying, cheating, and stealing as needed.
The plague and the bombs and all of the deaths had only made this philosophy spread quicker throughout the remaining populace. These things proved, once and for all, that there was no one steering the ship. No guiding light. No hand of fate that swooped down to pluck us from certain destruction. We were all free to choose, free to act and react, free to live or die at the random whims of a universe that did not care. All of the worst things weren’t just possible. They had happened, were still happening.
Her prey moved from the produce area to the booths with scavenged items as these thoughts reverberated in her skull, and she followed. They navigated the path linking the two markets, about as wide as a city street and utterly packed with people on foot.
Dust kicked up in clouds where all of the feet shifted out of time with each other, disturbing the places around the market where the grass had been worn down to sandy gray soil. At least it hadn’t rained in a few days. The worst Saturdays were those when everyone clomped around in the mud, squishing and flinging muck about like pigs in a pen.
Whenever his back was to her, as it was for the moment, she could see it. She could see him hunched over her body, bludgeoning and strangling and holding her under the water. And whenever she saw it, her knife itched to be held, to be brandished and unleashed.
But not yet.
Back at home, she sat at her desk, barely able to contain her excitement. Pangs of giddiness rippled through her, made her squirm a little in her chair.
The pen fluttered in her hand, writing down all that she’d observed. All of it flickered again in her mind’s eye as she scribbled it onto the page – the route he’d walked in the market, all of the reiterated mannerisms and gestures, the flash of contempt that lit his face up with hatred. Every detail she could remember throbbed in her skull. None were cast aside. It was enough to fill a page and a half in her journal, even if nothing of great importance transpired on this outing.
Dusk purpled the sky out the window, so she wrote by candlelight. Shadows swathed everything outside of the little circle of light atop her desk. Not pitch black, it was an irregular mesh of darkness that clouded things but didn’t quite make them invisible. It almost looked like dyed black cotton stretched over everything, like those fake spider webs people used to hang on porches and trees around Halloween.
She flipped back through the pages and tallied the entries up. Twenty-six times she’d followed him. The figure was hard to believe. Not every day, she knew, but damn near. Some days had two sessions, a few even had three.
But yeah. That would be enough. More than enough. She no longer needed to spy.
The excitement swelled again as that notion sank in, the tingle along her scalp surpassing the level of intensity it had reached before. It was real. She was ready now. All the way ready. She knew his routine in and out, knew which people might miss him and when.
The truth was that he was a loner most of the time. She didn’t foresee any problems, any people getting in the way. On one hand, that made all of her prep work feel like a waste of time. On the other, it was the best possible news. She could remain hidden rather easily, she believed.
>
She pursed her lips and a puff of breath snuffed out the candle. The smell of smoke filled her tiny cabin right away, but it wasn’t a bad odor, she thought. It was comforting in its familiarity, in the part it played in the ritual. The light went out, and the smoky smell wafted up, and with those two events, the pressure of the day was officially over, and she could sleep.
Taking careful steps, she walked to the window, and she looked out at the places where the stars glittered against the blackened sky.
She thought about what Curtis had said about picking a path. He probably thought he was dissuading her from doing something irrational, something emotionally driven, but he was dead wrong. Doing nothing was the path where she lost everything. Her plan might lead to death. She might get caught and get beheaded in front of an agitated mob of her peers. But doing nothing ensured a lifetime of suffering, didn’t it? Especially if Isaac did this again, did it to another girl, and she did nothing to stop it. That was the path of damnation.
Death would be a mercy in comparison.
Decker
The Compound
265 days after
For the first month at the compound, Decker walked around numb with shock. Being around people was so stimulating now. He couldn’t process it. Not yet. He felt so much of everything that it turned into nothing. That’s how he thought of it, anyway.
His body went through a series of responses — sweating and nausea and a heart that beat as fast as humming bird wings. But inside, he felt nothing. Paralysis. Death.
He fell in with the laborers and filled the days chopping wood, hauling water, constructing cabins, and other odd jobs. He liked the work. It made him feel useful, like he was accomplishing something of value and in that way becoming a part of this strange community.
Socially, though, he kept to himself. People came along to talk to him now and then — mostly the two women who’d found him and Louis, the unofficial leader of the manual laborers. Everyone else said hello and things of that nature. They were all polite. Even kind. He’d overheard Louis talking about him — telling the other men what a hard worker he was — but it only embarrassed him. Made him feel even further outside of things.