A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  What if he’d run into someone faster?

  Only one thing to do.

  “I’m going to take a stroll over to George’s just to see if he’s okay.”

  Judy gasped. “No, Dad! You can’t! It’s too far!”

  “Only across the street.”

  “But your legs—”

  “—are only half gone.”

  I’d met George shortly after the last riot. I had two hard legs then. I’d come looking for a sturdier building than the one we’d been burned out of. He helped us move in here.

  I was suspicious at first, I admit that. I mean, I kept asking myself, What does this guy want? Turned out he only wanted to be friends. And so friends we became. He was soon the only other man I trusted in this whole world. And that being the case, I wanted a gun—for protection against all those other men I didn’t trust. George told me he had stolen a bunch during the early lootings. I traded him some Sterno and batteries for a .38 and a pump-action 12-gauge shotgun with ammo for both. I promptly sawed off the barrel of the shotgun. If the need arose, I could clear a room real fast with that baby.

  So it was the shotgun I reached for now. No need to fool with it—I kept its chamber empty and its magazine loaded with #5 shells. I laid it on the floor and reached into the rag bag by the door and began tying old undershirts around my knees. Maybe I shouldn’t call them knees; with the lower legs and caps gone, “knee” hardly seemed appropriate.

  From there it was a look through the peep hole to make sure the hall was clear, a blown kiss to Judy, then a shuffle into the hall. I was extra wary at first, ranging the landing up and down, looking for rats. But there weren’t any in sight. I slung the shotgun around my neck, letting it hang in front as I started down the stairs one by one on hands and butt, knees first, each flabby lower leg dragging alongside its respective thigh.

  Two flights down to the lobby, then up on my padded knees to the swinging door, a hard push through and I was out on the street.

  Silence.

  We kept our windows tightly closed against the cold and so I hadn’t noticed the change. Now it hit me like a slap in the face. As a lifelong New Yorker I’d never heard the city like this. Make that not heard. Even when there’d been nothing doing on your street, you could always hear that dull roar pulsing from the sky and the pavement and the walls of the buildings. The life sound of the city, the beating of its heart, the whisper of its breath, the susurrant rush of blood through its capillaries.

  It had stopped.

  The shiver that ran over me was not just the March wind’s sharp edge. The street was deserted. A plague had been through here, but no contorted bodies were strewn about. You didn’t fall down and die on the spot with the softness. No, that would be too kind. You died by inches, by bone lengths, in back rooms, trapped, unable to make it to the street. No public displays of morbidity. Just solitary deaths of quiet desperation.

  In a secret way I was glad everyone was gone—nobody around to see me tooling across the sidewalk on my rag-wrapped knees like some skid row geek.

  The city looked different from down here. When you have legs to stand on you never realize how cracked the sidewalks are, how dirty. The buildings, their windows glaring red with the setting sun that had poked through the clouds over New Jersey, looked half again as high as they had when I was a taller man.

  I shuffled to the street and caught myself looking both ways before sliding off the curb. I smiled at the thought of getting run down by a truck on my first trip in over a month across a street that probably hadn’t seen the underside of a car since December.

  Despite the absurdity of it, I hurried across, and felt relief when I finally reached the far curb. Pulling open the damn doors to George’s apartment building was a chore, but I slipped through both of them and into the lobby. George’s bike—a light-frame Italian model ten-speeder—was there. I didn’t like that. George took that bike everywhere. Of course he could have found a car and some gas and gone sightseeing and not told me, but still the sight of that bike standing there made me uneasy.

  I shuffled by the silent bank of elevators, watching my longing expression reflected in their silent, immobile chrome doors. The fire door to the stairwell was a heavy one, but I squeezed through and started up the steps—backward. Maybe there was a better way, but I hadn’t found it. It was all in the arms: Sit on the bottom step, get your arms back, palms down on the step above, lever yourself up. Repeat this ten times and you’ve done a flight of stairs. Two flights per floor. Thank the Lord or Whatever that George had decided he preferred a second-floor apartment to a penthouse after the final power failure.

  It was a good thing I was going up backward. I might never have seen the rats if I’d been faced around the other way.

  Just one appeared at first. Alone, it was almost cute with its twitching whiskers and its head bobbing up and down as it sniffed the air at the bottom of the flight. Then two more joined it, then another half dozen. Soon they were a brown wave, undulating up the steps toward me.

  I hesitated for an instant, horrified and fascinated by their numbers and all their little black eyes sweeping toward me, then I jolted myself into action. I swung the scattergun around, pumped a shell into the chamber, and let them have a blast. Dimly through the reverberating roar of the shotgun I heard a chorus of squeals and saw flashes of flying crimson blossoms, then I was ducking my face into my arms to protect my eyes from the ricocheting shot. I should have realized the danger of shooting in a cinderblock stairwell like this. Not that it would have changed things—I still had to protect myself—but I should have anticipated the ricochets.

  The rats did what I’d hoped they’d do—jumped on the dead and near-dead of their number and forgot about me. I let the gun hang in front of me again and continued up the stairs to George’s floor.

  He didn’t answer his bell but the door was unlocked. I’d warned him about that in the past but he’d only laughed in that carefree way of his. “Who’s gonna pop in?” he’d say. Probably no one. But that didn’t keep me from locking mine, even though George was the only one who knew where I lived. I wondered if that meant I didn’t really trust George.

  I put the question aside and pushed the door open.

  It stank inside. And it was empty as far as I could see. But there was this sound, this wheezing, coming from one of the bedrooms. Calling his name and announcing my own so I wouldn’t get my head blown off, I closed the door behind me—locked it—and followed the sound. I found George.

  And retched.

  George was a blob of flesh in the middle of his bed. Everything but some ribs, some of his facial bones, and the back of his skull had gone soft on him.

  I stood there on my knees in shock, wondering how this could have happened. George was immune. He’d laughed at the softness. He’d been walking around as good as new just last week. And now . . .

  His lips were dry and cracked and blue—he couldn’t speak, couldn’t swallow, could barely breathe. And his eyes . . . they seemed to be just floating there in a quivering pool of flesh, begging me . . . darting to his left again and again . . . begging me . . .

  For what?

  I looked to his left and saw the guns. He had a suitcase full of them by the bedroom door. All kinds. I picked up a heavy-looking revolver—an S&W .357—and glanced at him. He closed his eyes and I thought he smiled.

  I almost dropped the pistol when I realized what he wanted.

  “No, George!”

  He opened his eyes again. They began to fill with tears.

  “George—I can’t!”

  Something like a sob bubbled past his lips. And his eyes . . . his pleading eyes . . .

  I stood there a long time in the stink of his bedroom, listening to him wheeze, feeling the sweat collect between my palm and the pistol grip. I knew I couldn’t do it. Not George, the big, friendly, good-natured slob I’d been depending on.

  Suddenly, I felt my pity begin to evaporate as a flare of irrational anger began to
rise. I had been depending on George now that my legs were half gone, and here he’d gone soft on me. The bitter disappointment fueled the anger. I knew it wasn’t right, but I couldn’t help hating George just then for letting me down.

  “Damn you, George!”

  I raised the pistol and pointed it where I thought his brain should be. I turned my head away and pulled the trigger. Twice. The pistol jumped in my hand. The sound was deafening in the confines of the bedroom.

  Then all was quiet except for the ringing in my ears. George wasn’t wheezing anymore. I didn’t look around. I didn’t have to see. I have a good imagination.

  I fled that apartment as fast as my ruined legs would carry me.

  But I couldn’t escape the vision of George and how he looked before I shot him. It haunted me every inch of the way home, down the now empty stairs where only a few tufts of dirty brown fur were left to indicate that rats had been swarming there, out into the dusk and across the street and up more stairs to home.

  George . . . how could it be? He was immune.

  Or was he? Maybe the softness had followed a different course in George, slowly building up in his system until every bone in his body was riddled with it and he went soft all at once. God, what a noise he must have heard when all those bones went in one shot. That was why he hadn’t been able to call or answer the walkie-talkie.

  But what if it had been something else? What if the virus theory was right and George was the victim of a more virulent mutation?

  The thought made me sick with dread. Because if that were true, it meant Judy would eventually end up like George. And I was going to have to do for her what I’d done for George.

  But what of me, then? Who was going to end it for me? I didn’t know if I had the guts to shoot myself. And what if my hands went soft before I had the chance?

  I didn’t want to think about it, but it wouldn’t go away. I couldn’t remember ever being so frightened. I almost considered going down to Rockefeller Center and presenting Judy and myself to the leechers, but killed that idea real quick. Never. I’m no jerk. I’m college-educated. A degree in biology. I know what they’d do to us.

  Inside, Judy had wheeled her chair over to the door and was waiting for me. I couldn’t let her know.

  “Not there,” I told her before she could ask, and busied myself with putting the shotgun away so I wouldn’t have to look her straight in the eyes.

  “Where could he be?” Her voice was tight.

  “I wish I knew. Maybe he went down to Rockefeller Center. If he did, it’s the last we’ll ever see of him.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “Then tell me where else he can be.”

  She was silent.

  I did Warner Oland’s Chan: “Numbah One Dawtah is finally at loss for words. Peace reigns at last.”

  I could see that I failed to amuse, so I decided a change of subject was in order.

  “I’m tired.”

  It was the truth. The trip across the street had been exhausting.

  “Me, too.” She yawned.

  “Want to get some sleep?”

  I knew she did. I was just staying a step or two ahead of her so she wouldn’t have to ask to be put to bed. She was a dancer, a fine, proud artist. Judy would never have to ask anyone to put her to bed. Not while I was around. As long as I was able I would spare her the indignity of dragging herself along the floor.

  I gathered Judy up in my arms. The whole lower half of her body was soft; her legs hung over my left arm like weighted drapes. It was all I could do to keep from crying when I felt them so limp and formless. My dancer . . . you should have seen her in Swan Lake. Her legs had been so strong, so sleekly muscular, like her mother’s . . .

  I took her to the bathroom and left her alone. Which left me alone with my daymares.

  What if there really was a mutation of the softness and my dancer began leaving me again, slowly, inch by inch? What was I going to do when she was gone? My wife was gone. My folks were gone. My what few friends I’d ever had were gone. Judy was the only attachment I had left. Without her I’d break loose from everything and just float off into space. I needed her . . .

  When she was finished in the bathroom I carried her out and arranged her on the bed. I tucked her in and kissed her goodnight.

  Out in the living room I slipped under the covers of the fold-out bed and tried to sleep. Useless. The fear wouldn’t leave me alone. I fought it, telling myself that George was a freak case, that Judy and I had licked the softness. We were immune and we’d stay immune. Let everyone else turn into puddles of Jell-O, I wasn’t going to let them suck us dry to save themselves. We were on our way to inheriting the earth, Judy and I, and we didn’t even have to be meek about it.

  But still sleep refused to come. So I lay there in the growing darkness in the center of the silent city and listened . . . listened as I did every night . . . as I knew I would listen for the rest of my life . . . listened for that sound . . . that cellophane crinkling sound . . .

  THE LAST ONE MO’ ONCE

  GOLDEN OLDIES REVIVAL

  The announcer broke in with the news—right into the middle of a song by the latest New Wave sensation, Polio. Philip “Flip” Goodloe was gone. The father and seminal stylist of the rock ‘n’ roll guitar was dead.

  Lenny Winter leaned back and took a long draw on the Royal Jamaican delicately balanced between his pudgy thumb and forefinger. He certainly didn’t mind anybody cutting Polio’s music short—this New Wave crap was worse than the stuff he jockeyed in his heyday. And he wasn’t all that surprised about Flip.

  Dead . . . the Flipper was dead. Lenny had sensed that coming last week. The only disconcerting thing was it had happened so soon after seeing him. Fifteen or twenty years without laying eyes on Flip Goodloe, then Lenny visits him, then he’s dead, all within a few days’ time. Definitely disconcerting.

  He listened for details about the death but none came. Only a hushed voice repeating that the major influence on every rocker who had ever picked up an electric six-string was dead. Even guitarists who had never actually heard a Flip Goodloe record owed him a debt because, as the voice said, if you weren’t directly influenced by Goodloe, you were influenced by somebody who got his licks from somebody else who got his licks from Flip Goodloe. “All riffs eventually lead to Goodloe,” the voice said. It closed the break-in with: “. . . the exact cause of death is unknown at this time.

  “I can tell you the exact cause of death,” Lenny muttered to the empty room. “Smack. Flip Goodloe the hophead finally over-juiced himself.”

  The disc jockey—whoops, sorry, they liked to be called “radio personalities” now—yanked the Polio record and put on “Mary-Liz,” Flip’s first hit record. An instant Flip Goodloe retrospective was under way.

  In spite of his personal knowledge of what a jerk Flip was, Lenny Winter suffered a pang of nostalgia as the frenetic guitar notes and wailing voice poured out of the twin Bose 901 s in the corners of the room. Nobody could play like the Flipper in his day. Flip didn’t showboat and he didn’t just doodle around the melody—he got behind his bands and pushed, driving them ‘til they were cooking at white heat.

  Lenny Winter put his cigar down and pulled his considerable bulk out of the recliner. He was pushing fifty-five and was at least that many pounds overweight. He waddled over to the north wall of his trophy room—one of the smaller of the eighteen rooms in his house. Where was it, now? He scanned along rows of gold records. There—the 45 with the Backgammon label. “Mary-Liz” by Flip Goodloe. A million sales, RIAA-certified. And beneath the title, the composer credit: (P. Goodloe-L. Weinstein). Lenny smiled. Not too many people knew that Lenny Winter’s birth certificate read “Leonard Weinstein.”

  He wondered how many copies would sell in the inevitable surge of interest after Flip’s death. Look how many Lennon records moved after he bought it. Lenny did not like to think of himself as one who made money off the dead, but a buck was a buck, and half of
all royalties from sales and airplay of a good number of Flip’s early songs belonged to Lenny. So it was only fair that he got what was rightfully his. He made a mental note to call BMI in the morning.

  The radio segued into Goodloe’s second big hit, “Little Rocker”—another P. Goodloe-L. Weinstein composition. A gold copy of that, too, was somewhere on the wall.

  Those were the days when Lenny could do no wrong. Flip had it all then, too. But he blew it. Lenny had managed to stay at or near the top. Flip had been nowhere for years.

  Which was why Lenny had visited him last week—to give the Flipper another chance.

  He shook his head. What a mistake that had been.

  It hadn’t been easy to find Flip. He had moved back to Alexandria, Virginia, his old hometown. He still played an occasional solo gig in some of the M Street clubs in DC, but sporadically. He was unreliable. Club owners learned to expect him when they saw him. Everyone knew he was shooting shit again. No one had a phone number, but a bartender knew a girl who had gone home with him after a recent gig. Lenny found her. As expected, she was young and white. She remembered the address.

  It was in a garden apartment complex that gave new meaning to the word “run-down.” Waist-high weeds sprouted through cracks in the parking lot blacktop; a couple of stripped and rotting wrecks slumped amid the more functional cars; children’s toys lay scattered over the dirt patch that had once been a lawn; on the buildings themselves the green of the previous coat of paint showed through cracks and chips in the current white coat, which was none too current.

  This was where Flip Goodloe lived? Lenny shook his head. Flip could have had it all.

  Building seven, apartment 4-D. Lenny pushed the bell button but heard no ring within. He did hear an acoustic guitar plunking away on the other side of the door, so he knocked. No answer. He knocked again, louder. The guitar kept playing, but not loud enough to drown out Lenny’s pounding on the door. The player obviously heard Lenny; he was just ignoring him.