by Quil Carter
Drake slammed the door shut behind him, walked across the apartment and down the apartment hallway, and then to the left where his room was.
“Elish didn’t want to see you either,” Drake said. He threw the bag onto the bed and fished out the box of cookies he’d already opened, then half an apple pie, six filled donuts, two one litre bottles of ChiCola Root Beer and a bottle of rum. “I can’t think of anyone else but Sanguine, and he just went all crazy and he might not be back for a while.”
Drake cradled the food in his arms and turned towards the closet door. He juggled a few things and opened the wooden door, then walked inside.
The walk-in closet was a good size and he was able to make it super dark. His new pet got spooked in the daylight, he wasn’t used to seeing the sun. Drake surmised that he must be nocturnal. At least he was now used to the dim forty volt light bulb that Drake had above him. So Drake put the food down and turned on the light.
“Come on out, I have good food and good drink.” Drake sat down beside his food and brought out another cookie. He made a kissing noise like he was coaxing out a cat and giggled to himself. “Sanguine told me so many stories about how he was like this when he was ill. But… you were in a much smaller cage, huh?”
There was movement behind several black garbage bags of clothes, then, slowly but surely, a blue blanket was drawn down and thin legs could be seen. Those legs moved to kneeling and a man with black hair, and a white frock to the left side of his head, looked over at Drake, his mismatched eyes staring with fear and his movements slow and cautious.
“You didn’t tell Silas?” the man asked. He sat down in front of Drake and gently took one of the marshmallow cookies. Drake smiled as his pet bit down on it politely and ate it. He was so different than what Drake remembered Sanguine being, but like he had said, they came from different places.
“No. I would have to if he asked but I don’t have to say willingly… Sanguine calls that a loop hole,” Drake said. He opened up the root beer bottle and set it down in front of the man. “I’ve asked two people if they want to see you so far and both gave me the same typical answer which sums up to: Fuck off, Drake. Story of my life.”
The young man finished his cookie and wiped a hand down his face. “I need to leave soon. If Silas is awake… I can’t stay here.”
Drake thought for a second. “Want to go back to Olympus?”
The young man shook his head. “You said Sanguine is gone. There isn’t a point.”
Drake stopped chewing before swallowing his food. “What do you mean? What do those two things have in common?”
The young man’s expression changed to worry. “He was the one who broke me out. I hurt him when I was scared and when I described him to you… you said he was in the hospital bed.”
Drake looked at him puzzled, before the pieces connected themselves together. “Oh, shit. That’s Jade. He’s my other brother but he has a lot of Sanguine in him. He’s really really sick.” Drake looked at his friend and his face turned to worry too. “I love Jade. He’s such a good brother, even if I like it when he gets punished.”
“Jade?” the man said back to himself. “I could sense how sick he is. He’s sicker than you. I wanted to help him. I don’t like seeing him sick.”
Drake laughed at this as if the man was making a joke, even though his expression was grave. “Oh, you can't help that!” Drake grinned at this. “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“I’m not mad,” the man said back.
“You must be!” Drake said back animatedly. “Or you wouldn’t have come here!”
The man raised a single eyebrow and Drake burst out laughing, though he stopped when he saw the man wasn’t laughing with him. “That’s from Alice in Wonderland. What I said, it’s from a book I love. You did it perfect. Good job.” Drake put a hand over his heart. “I once had a tattoo of the Cheshire cat for ten years but it got burned off. I’ll get a new one, one day.”
The man shook his head and took a long drink of pop. “I may hide in Olympus again… where Jade is. I can’t let Silas see me.” He looked around the dimly lit closet, his one blue eye shining under the light. “I need time still to just be in darkness. This is still really overwhelming.”
“You did seem really scared when you came back from Elish’s,” Drake said and he started eating a donut. “You get really weird when you’re scared.”
“I get weird whenever I reach any intense emotion,” the man said quietly. “I think that’s why I was locked away.”
“You don’t remember why?”
The man shook his head. “I just… remember walking around the dead world until I saw Skyfall. I remember I died a lot to get here but besides that… he locked me up soon after I met him.”
“That sucks,” Drake said. “But I’ll take care of you, Napoleon.”
The look the man gave him was flat and almost pained. “I told you that’s not my name.”
“You have two different colour eyes and different colour hair.”
Slowly the man closed those mismatch eyes and he let out a long, tense breath. “You’re thinking of Neapolitan. Neapolitan ice cream is vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry…”
“It still reminds me of different colour things. I’ve never had a human pet before. Come on, let me name you. Anyway… you need to be in hiding and he’ll recognize your name if I say it, Gage.”
“Very well, Drake. You can call me Napoleon. I guess it could be worse.” The man looked up as Drake rose to his feet and watched him stretch.
“I’m going to take a nap on the porch. I’ll visit you tonight and just be quiet if you hear Silas,” Drake said with a smile.
The man named Gage nodded slowly. “Thank you, Drake. For calming me down when you found me, and helping me stay hidden. I appreciate it… I know you don’t know me from a hole in the wall.”
Drake grinned. “You’re my pet, I need to keep you safe. And don’t worry… you won’t believe the crazy stuff that we have happen. Because remember…” Drake let out a shrill and crazed laugh as he walked out of the closet, before he poked his head back in. “… we’re all mad here!”
The closet door shut.
Chapter 12
Killian
“I can’t believe it,” I said while waving the dust motes away from my face. I stepped through the window that Reaver had broken and took a moment to just take all of it in.
It was a Wal-Mart and it was completely untouched. A spread of darkness was in front of me, only a spot of light from the flashlight I was holding lit my way, and even that was swallowed easily by the darkness. I envied Reaver for his night vision and wished Perish had given me those enhancements.
My flashlight shone on a display of diapers and below that I saw dust-covered fluff and chewed on boxes. Those were just radrat or scavers who were collecting things for their nests, or the plaguelands’ equivalent; it looked like this place hadn’t been stepped into since the Fallocaust.
I could hear Reaver’s boots crunching on rubble and dust ahead of me. He had gone in first to inspect it to make sure it was safe for me. I didn’t see a point since I could no longer permanently die, but in his words ‘hauling your ass back and waiting for you to resurrect is a pain in the ass’ so I respected his wishes and let him do his thing.
I walked past the diapers to a display of soda pop, long since flat, and let out a squeal when I saw stacks and stacks of potato chips, and beside it, Oreo and Christie cookies.
“We’re going to get so fat!” I exclaimed with an excited hiss. I heard Reaver chuckle and shone my light to where I heard him. He squinted under the light and made a face, so I turned the beam back to the dusty floor, now holding his boot prints. “I’m so happy I made a list.”
“Yes, Mother Massey, your list is in my pocket,” Reaver said with a smirk before he coughed into his hand. It was really dusty here. “Why don’t you get a shopping cart and start loading things up? I’ll be hauling the electronics to the tr
ailer and any video games we want.”
“Don’t forget Pokémon!” I said as I grabbed a bag of chips and opened them. I tried one and handed the bag to Reaver. They were stale but not too stale. I could bring them up to snuff with the deep fryer that Reaver had fixed for us, that was crisping everything up great.
We were going to get fat here.
There might be some downsides to living in the plaguelands, but there weren’t many when you were immune to radiation. We had enough food to last us forever, enough entertainment to keep us from getting bored at night, and we had a river and water piping into our house too. It was perfect… I’d never been happier.
“Jade got you hooked on that shit too, eh?” Reaver took the bag and disappeared into the darkness with a shake of his head. “Okay, no more talking so I can keep listening. Big Shot told me there are some fucked up things here and I want to hear them before they hear us. Do you have your wimpy whistle?”
I looked at him, or his back anyway, rather flatly, then picked up the whistle he’d put over my neck before he went into the Wal-Mart. “Yes, I do. Do we have to call it that?” I’d blown on it as a test and Reaver couldn’t stop laughing at how pathetic and half-dead it sounded. I’d suggested an air horn just to be an ass. I could only imagine how much that would kill his chimera hearing.
“Killi whistle? We’ll call it the Killi whistle. Don’t take off your Killi whistle now, Killi Cat,” his voice faded as he got further and further away, but his chuckling seemed to echo around the Wal-Mart.
I smiled and shook my head before turning a left to where the store’s food was. I liked him being playful like this, any sign that he was back to normal was a welcome one.
It wasn’t like he wasn’t being normal… for about eighty percent of the time he was my Reaver. It was just at night with his night terrors and… and whenever we started to get frisky. The frisky times had been few and far between and when they happened it was all about me and he didn’t even take his pants off. Once he’d made me cum we were done and that was it.
I hadn’t said anything, of course, but still… I wondered how long this would go on for, and I also wondered if the sun had risen and set on us having sex. It had almost been six months since we’d done it back in Mariano. I missed it.
I really fucking missed it.
But I also understood it wasn’t something he could… do right now.
Reaver had been hunting, a lot. Killing things distracted him from what was going on in his head. He had to keep himself busy or else I knew the dark thoughts creeped up on him. I hadn’t minded, the house needed a lot of dusting and cleaning and he was getting parts for our new Dyson vacuum cleaner with hopes it would be fixed soon. He went out and hunted, and I stayed home and cooked and cleaned.
I scowled. I should offer to go hunting more; I hated feeling like a housewife.
And as I looked around a dusty aisle, boxes of grey with only faint wisps of their former colours peeking out under the ash, and underneath my feet, crumbling rubble and the occasional shard of thin plastic from broken ceiling lights, I realized where I was. I was in the food aisle with a list in my hand, as my boyfriend got parts to fix electronics.
Mental note: Do more manly things. You’re an immortal being now, Killian.
I found an abandoned shopping cart, and after clearing out some papers and an old purse, I tipped it up right and tested the wheels. They were good enough, so I started wiping off boxes and collecting us our food. Cereal was a big thing, and powdered milk, as much canned meat and vegetables as we could carry and Chef Boyardee and canned chili, things like that. I also wanted spaghetti sauce and noodles, rice and Rice-A-Roni…
I scanned my list and decided I really had to get to work. Reaver only wanted us to make trips in the quad once a month to conserve the fuel. It would be a long walk here and a longer wall back hauling this stuff on our backs.
I pushed the shopping cart to another aisle and was amazed to see both rows of shelves had been undisturbed. The packages had been left where they’d been stocked and the only disturbed part was where a ceiling light had come down, taking what looked like cookies and cracker boxes with it. I fished through and found a few uncrushed boxes and threw them in the cart, then continued on with only my flashlight to light my way. It was amazing how dark this place was, usually in the greywastes you had streams of light coming in from where the roof had collapsed but nope… not here.
I pushed the cart down to the next aisle which looked like canned things. I dusted off a can and was delighted to see a Del Monte label. That meant canned fruit which was Reaver’s favourite, even though he always stole my cherries if it was fruit cocktail. The cherries had no taste at all, he just liked them because they were red.
Whatever makes him happy, he was such a dolt. I threw five cans into the cart and kept pushing it down the aisle.
I passed something curious though… another purse. I kicked it with my boot and coughed from the dust. I shrugged and carried on, but in the next aisle when I was loading up on Chef Boyardee, I found another purse and a diaper bag and then two pairs of glasses.
That was weird. I picked up the purse and peeked inside. There was a wallet in it and some perfume, makeup, pens, and old receipts. It had been left here.
Then I realized with a scowl that there weren’t any bodies here. From what Perish, or Sky, had told me, the Fallocaust was sudden. Anyone this close to ground zero would’ve died instantly which I guess explained the purses and things being left behind… but it didn’t quite explain why there weren’t any bodies.
Actually we hadn’t been seeing much in the ways of bodies in any of the stores. Inside the houses we occasionally found one. They looked like dried up pieces of jerky, no moisture at all just brown hardened skin and meat stretched over bone. The radiation had screwed with the bacteria and preserved them until they dried up; there had been no predators to eat them the radanimals hadn’t evolved for probably decades after.
Odd. I continued on filling up my cart, and after kicking what had looked like bundles of ash, I found more purses, knapsacks, and a few grocery carts filled with food. I’d have to tell Reaver and see if he noticed.
The creaking of the squeaky wheels was all I could hear inside this vast building. I bet it would be a sensory deprivation nightmare if I didn’t have this flashlight and the noisy cart.
At this mention I started shining the flashlight all around me. I shone it on the meat section, full of pink Styrofoam plastic with blackened saran wrap over it. The black, dried blood and meat, had travelled up the coolers and it now looked like it was coated in mould. I looked down and even saw some of the mould on the…
My inner monologue stopped when I thought I’d seen something move in the open cooler. My brow furrowed at it and I focused on the flashlight beam. The more I stared at it though the more I became uncomfortable with the fact that I could only see my surroundings via a small beam of light. For all I knew there were predators all around me and I just hadn’t shone the light on them.
I whirled around and shone the flashlight behind me. But all I could see were rows of grey shelves and dusty boxes to my left and the rest of the open meat coolers, and further on, the produce section. The only thing disturbed here were my own boot prints and the wheels of the cart; they were trailing behind me and so crisp it was like I was walking on the moon.
This place was starting to freak me out and I only had my own imagination to blame. I sighed and shook my head, feeling like an idiot, and decided to be the man I knew I was, the immortal man, and not let my dumb imagination scare me.
Then I turned around and shone the flashlight beam back onto the open cooler… and I screamed.
In between the pink Styrofoam and the blackened but shining plastic was… what looked like an eel, or a… long worm. Its tip was thin and pointed and it was…
I took a slow step back as its tip, or head, rose into the air. I looked down, trying to gauge how long it was but… I couldn’t, it seemed t
o be growing as it slithered into the air.
My flashlight rose the higher it got. I didn’t know what it was going to do; it was strange but I wasn’t scared of it. Why would I be scared of a… of a…
I blinked as its black pointed tip started waving around in the dead and musty air, then its raised body bowed down until it was making an ark. It twisted around almost entirely until its head tip was pointing at me.
I stared at it and tilted my head, trying to figure out why it had stopped turning.
I think… I think it was looking at me.
Then suddenly it shot towards me like it was being rocket propelled. I gasped and took a step back as it wrapped its whip-like body over my neck and plunged down my shirt. I picked up its body and pulled it out, its body hard but at the same time extremely flexible, it was like I was pulling a cross between a strip of leather and an elastic band.
I screamed when I felt a stabbing pain in my neck. I dropped the flashlight and grabbed onto its body then yanked it as hard as I could. I felt something rip out of me, and when I managed to fling the eel-creature, I saw a sheen of blood on its pointed tip. It had fucking… I think it had fucking bit me.
I turned around, put the whistle in my mouth and launched into a dead, but blind, run.
My lips closed around the whistle and I blew it as hard as I could. I think I was screaming into it as I dashed down the dirty aisles, I kept stumbling and tripping but every time I did I got up and continued running.
But I was losing my barring. I looked around the pitch black, darkness consuming me and eating me alive. I felt disoriented, confused. I couldn’t see anything, and the terror scrambling my senses was telling me there was no objects blocking my path, no displays of chips or metal crates full of DVDs. I ran into them and when I fell, I got up and kept running.
When I slammed into something soft, I screamed from fear. I pulled away from it but it grabbed me and ripped the whistle out of my mouth.