Before We Die Alone

by Ike Hamill

  I’m not sure what he’s asking. Can I run away from him? You bet. He’s at least six-inches taller than me, and probably outweighs me by a hundred or more pounds of muscle. I would run away from him all day, let alone in a dark alley.

  I start to turn and he calls out. “Not that way! They’re coming for you that way.”

  I glance back. There seems to be actual concern in his voice.

  “I can get you to safety,” he says. “You just have to follow me.”

  I look to him and then back up the alley. Him. Alley.

  “Come if you want, but you shouldn’t stay here,” he says.

  He takes a couple of running steps and leaps into the air. For all his muscles, he moves like a gymnast. He grabs the lowest rung of a fire-escape ladder and pulls it down with his weight. He climbs up to the point where the ladder is going to retract again and looks back at me.

  I make a quick decision and follow. My body immediately protests. I’m in no shape to be climbing a damn fire escape.

  “Try to not be afraid,” he calls down to me as I climb. “You’re fear-scenting everywhere.”

  I’m what? Is that a verb?

  When I get to the top, he’s waiting for me on the steel grate. It must be murder on his bare feet.

  “I’m what?”

  “The guys are going to try to draw them off with their scent, but they’re going to track you down if you don’t stop fear-scenting,” he says. “Just try to stay calm.”

  Given the circumstances, I thought I was keeping everything together pretty well.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “And try to keep quiet,” he says. When he starts climbing, he steps as lightly as a cat. He’s up and around, up and around, pulling away from me with each step. I take the stairs two at a time. It’s tiring, but it seems easier for me to keep quiet that way. It’s brighter at the top of the stairs. The glow of the sky shows me his face. He presses his finger to his lips and points down.

  I look down and then scramble over the edge of the building onto the roof. There must have been a dozen bears down there in the alley. I don’t think any of them saw me.

  The man approaches and whispers in my ear. “Step carefully. They hear everything.”

  I follow him across the tar. When he gets to the short wall on the far side, he’s up and over without a sound. I have to work a lot harder at it, but he puts out a hand to help me climb down. The next roof is packed gravel and he runs. On the far side of that long roof, he uses a ladder bolted to the wall to get down. This roof is sloped slate, and it’s slippery as hell. I can only imagine how far I would fall if I lost my footing. I move up higher on the roof so I can put one hand on the peak. It’s slower, but it feels infinitely safer. Meanwhile, my naked guide is pulling away. He doesn’t seem to notice that he has lost his charge.

  My hand lands on something sticky, and I react. Pulling my hand back is a terrible idea, but I don’t realize that until my foot is slipping on the slate. Funny thing about friction—test it and it will change its mind. My knee doesn’t get good traction at all, and I start to slide down the roof. There’s nothing to grab. My hands slap at the roof, trying to arrest the skid, but it’s no use. I’m picking up speed as I go.

  I flip over onto my back and try to get more skin against the surface. The edge of the roof is rushing towards me. There is a row of metal cleats a foot back from the edge. I try to align my feet with them and pray that they’ll stop my slide. As I gain more speed, I pedal my feet and flap my arms, trying to do a backstroke against gravity.

  I’m about to hit the cleats. I put my feet down and bend my legs just a bit, hoping to absorb my momentum. It’s a terrible idea. I hit the cleats. Miraculously, they hold. My momentum isn’t completely dampened though. Instead, it’s redirected. My bent legs simply turn my feet into pivots and my body comes away from the surface of the roof. I wave my arms, trying to catch my balance. For one tiny moment, it seems like I’m going to stop when I’m perfectly upright. I stand there for a split second and then realize I’m already tipping forward. I’m going to pitch over the edge of the roof head first.

  I see beyond the lip, down to the parking lot below. Bears are moving between the parked cars. They were moving away from the building, but one of them has turned. The bear is looking up towards me. I don’t know if the bear has seen me or not, but I suppose I would be hard to miss. It’s not every night that a half-naked man flaps his arms around at the edge of a four-story building. Of course, I won’t be there long. I’m over-balanced and gaining speed with nowhere to go. I have a strong urge to jump. My legs want to push me away from the building, so I won’t hit the side on the way down. That’s foolish. I’m going to die either way, but why add even more velocity?

  Instead, I let my legs collapse. I’m hoping that somehow I’ll find purchase if I just get my center of gravity lower. Funny thing about angular momentum, the closer you bring the weight to the rotation point, the faster you rotate. I spill forward over the edge.

  ---- * ----

  My guide’s muscular arm flies out. He grabs my hand just as I tip over the edge of the roof. His bare feet are braced on those brackets. His toes are curled around the top of them, and he leans back to counter my fall. With his pull, I’m propelled back to the roof. My feet hit and I begin to collapse back to the slate tiles. He stops me again, holding me up until I find my balance.

  “They’ve seen us,” he says.

  Keeping my hand, he starts running. I have no choice but to follow. We go up and over the peak. He runs down the other side. I’m trying to slow down, but he’s pulling too hard and running too fast. With no other choice, I match his strides and we plunge down the other side of the roof. Just before the edge, he leaps. We fly across the gap and land on the downhill side of another roof. He runs up that one as well.

  This time, we sprint across the peak. Another terrifying leap clears the distance between two buildings.

  Mercifully, after a quick run down the edge of a wall that can’t be more than a foot wide, we’re back on another flat roof. We sprint across it and I leap with him over that side. It’s a good thing I didn’t stop to consider the jump—I never would have attempted it. I merely saw the effort that my escort put into it, and I tried to match him. The next thing I know, we are sailing over empty space. The blackness stretches beneath me and we fall to the lower surface.

  He touches down and rolls. I hit with a grunt and fall on my face. In an instant, his hands are pulling me to my feet so we can continue running. The next few roofs require climbing to get up to them. We use ladders, climb up bricks, and step on big refrigeration units. We pause in the shadows and listen for pursuit.

  After a long wait, he decides that it’s safe to descend.

  “I think we lost them a few blocks ago,” he says.

  I can’t answer. I’m too busy trying to keep from vomiting up my lungs. He guides me down another fire escape and I see that we’re a dash away from the park. That seems to be his destination. I figure we must be close because he’s being extra careful.

  “The others left a scent-trail for the bears, but I’m afraid they’ll disregard it now that they’ve seen us. We’ll cross the pond to be sure they’re not following.”

  When I finally catch my breath, I try to beg off. “Thanks for leading me away and everything, but I’ll be on my way now,” I say. Of course, I’m not totally sure he has done me any favors. I only have his word that the bears were even chasing me. They were probably just looking to acquire the black bear again. I’m not sure where I’ll go, but it won’t be into the park or across any pond.

  “You can’t,” he says, grabbing my arm. “It’s too dangerous. We’re the only ones who can protect you.”

  “Oh?” I ask. Sure, they pulled off a daring rescue of the black bear, but these guys don’t seem to possess anything more daunting than spears. They don’t inspire a lot of confidence.

  “Trust me,” he says.

  I don’t.

  �
��Thanks, but no.” I turn to head out into the night. They city still feels on edge. I need to find a shirt and I need to blend back in. I feel exposed.

  “Wait!” he calls. “At least let us heal your wounds.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’m okay.”

  I pick up my pace and put some distance between myself and the naked man. Where would one find a shirt in the middle of the night? My wallet is gone, but I still have my money clip. I should be able to swing enough cash for something. I can picture a set of shops that line the road that bisects the park. The gift shop would be closed, but there’s a chance that one of the others might be open.

  Of course, this is all pre-apocalypse thinking. The stores were probably shuttered when the asteroid’s impact was announced. My leg hurts. I came down hard on one of those crazy jumps. I try to even out my stride and mask the injury. Weakness stands out and invites more misdeeds. I need to assume a confident stride.

  ---- * ----

  It feels like I’ve been walking forever by the time I see the lights of the shops. Just the fact that they’re lit up is a good sign, but I have zero expectations. A new idea occurs to me as I cross the street. Maybe I could be a looter. Maybe I could liberate a shirt by simply tossing a rock through a store window.

  As I round the corner, I’m startled.

  People are everywhere. They’ve flocked to the lights like so many moths. People are laughing and joking on the wide sidewalks. Kids stand near their parents. Groups move together, engaging in light banter as they merge and split to head their separate ways.

  I go into the first shop I see, ignoring the sign that requires me to wear a shirt that I don’t have.

  The counter seems to be doing a lively trade in beer, newspapers, and candy, but there aren’t a lot of browsers in here.

  I grab a shirt from the rack and wait in line.

  “I’m surprised you’re open.”

  The man doesn’t ring me up or use the cash register at all. He names a round figure for the shirt and I hand over the bills.

  “Everywhere is open,” he says. “Everyone is celebrating.”

  The man dismisses me, but I manage to catch the eye of another customer who is folding a newspaper under his arm.

  For clarity—we had companies of people who gathered and published the news on a daily basis. These were bought whenever there was a splashy headline, like “POPE GETS AIDS, RECOVERS.” Or, sometimes, people would buy them because their son or daughter was included in the police blotter for eating babies. This evening, people bought a special edition with the title, “METEOR MISSES MARK.” There are tons of things wrong with that headline. For one, it’s not a meteor unless it’s going to hit the planet. Since it is going to miss, it’s an asteroid. Second, to suggest it’s going to miss its mark, implies that the asteroid had a goal or something. It’s just a rock. It has no mark.

  Back to the man with the paper.

  I point to it. “So the asteroid isn’t going to hit us, right?”

  He acknowledges with a nod but then gives me the bitchy version of yes. “I told my wife she was fucking crazy. She wanted to pack up and head for the mountains, but I put my foot down. I told her that those damn scientists had their heads up their asses. This was Y2K all over again.”

  For clarity—the year before the official change of the millennium, lots of people thought the world was going to end. It didn’t. The imagined crisis was called Y2K. Now, it seems like all we talk about is when the world will end. It’s going to end from climate change, or zombies, or a killer plague. Last generation, they thought it would end with nuclear war, but at least they had a plan. Granted, it was a shitty plan. You can’t just decide that the world will blow itself up and then think that a reasonable approach is to prove it right by building a million bombs.

  But now the apocalypse will supposedly come like an unstoppable freight train. Sure, we’ll be able to see it coming, and maybe we’ll even understand the mechanism. We heated up the climate, but it seemed like too much of an economic burden to stop. Or, we all die of a plague, but it was created in an effort to cure some other disease. These new Earth-enders are cumulative forces. By the time you truly recognize them, they’re out of control.

  That’s what they represent—the realization that the system is too big to control. At one point, we were masters of our domain, but now we’re just shitty stewards.

  I take my new shirt and blend back into the masses. It’s nice when something positive brings people out onto the streets. They usually only mingle like this when they’re commuting or protesting. Despite my fatigue, it feels good to walk. Maybe because I know that as soon as I sit down, I’m probably going to pass out.

  Chapter Eighteen

  * Injury *

  THEY SKY IS BEGINNING to warm up by the time I find a bench and take a seat. I’m a couple-hundred yards away from the hospital. They’re doing a brisk business this morning. Ambulances roll up, disgorge the new patients, and roll off. I’m not feeling well enough to go wait in line to see a doctor.

  I watched a documentary about Navy SEALs one time.

  For clarity—the Navy is our military force that operates on water; SEALs stands for SEa, Air, Land teams. So, two-thirds of what the SEALs do seems to be in the wrong medium for the Navy, but whatever.

  The SEALs are reportedly very durable. They endure incredible hardship during training. Yes, the training is supposed to toughen their bodies, but it’s also intended to toughen up their mental strength as well. Most of the time a person gives up on something, it’s not because their body has reached a limit, it’s because their brain has caved. I’m an impressionable sort. Having watched the documentary, all I can think is that my injuries are not serious, and I don’t need a doctor. A SEAL would just continue about their day and let their skin heal as it would. They wouldn’t waste time with a huge line at the emergency room. A SEAL would endure.

  Then again, maybe a SEAL would recognize the opportunity to get patched up, and they would go get medical attention regardless of how long it took. They would wait in line doggedly until they got their body squared up.

  This is why I’m stuck on the bench. I can’t decide what the smart course is. I can’t decide what a SEAL would do.

  Meanwhile, I’m not feeling so good. There’s a tightness in my stomach, and I have a sharp pain under my ribs every time I take a deep breath. It’s probably just exhaustion.

  The bench is nice. The bench supports my decision to sit there. The people walking by are smiling. The sky is brighter every second. Soon, it’s going to be a bright, beautiful morning—the kind where nobody has anything to worry about. We’re all like college students who just found out that the examination has been postponed, so we have more time to study. We won’t study, of course. We’ll squander all this free time, hoping that the exam will never come. And maybe it won’t.

  My eyes start to drift shut.

  I’m snapped awake by a cough that’s spontaneous and uncontrollable.

  At the end of the coughing, I spit out a wad of dark blood. I try to sit up straight, but my balance has taken a vacation. I sway back and forth as I try to find which direction is upright. Spots dance in front of my eyes. The “EMERGENCY” sign in the distance seems a little more imperative now. I’m not sure I could make it by this point.

  I put up a hand to a woman passing by with her kids. Who knows where she’s taking them this early in the morning, but she has a smile on her face, so it must be somewhere good. When she looks at me, the smile disappears, and she puts an arm protectively around each kid. I try to ask for help, but I start coughing again.

  My head slumps forward.

  I must be hallucinating.

  I see an arm snake out between the legs of the bench and a hand grabs my ankle. My mouth is open, and a line of bloody drool escapes and hangs from my lip.

  The fingers feel around on my ankle, like a witch trying to decide if I’m plump enough to eat.

  I slump to the side and hear a
scream.

  ---- * ----

  The last time I ever saw my father, he was pointing a gun at me. Granted, it was a very small-caliber gun. It was one of those tiny things with the anemic little barrel. It was the kind where you imagine the bullet coming out like a horsefly—something listless and juicy that you could swat out of the air before it bit you. Granted, he didn’t realize it was me. Still, I don’t react well when someone points a gun at me.

  Sometimes, my dad would call me because he had an emergency. This was back when I lived out in the suburbs. I rented a terrible little one-bedroom house that looked like it had been built from the packing materials that a real house had been shipped in. I drove a shitty old Dodge.

  For clarity—there was a time in the 1980s when it seemed like American auto manufacturers were angry at their customers. They produced shitty little rustbuckets that were marvels of bad engineering. Each part of the vehicle was made from substandard materials, and seemed to be designed to break at the slightest provocation. Common elements were dashboards that cracked if exposed to two hours of sunlight, door panels that rusted minutes after feeling their first splash of rain, plastic switches and knobs that broke off immediately, and engines that were optimized to fail, burn tremendous amounts of fuel, or both.

  My Dodge had all those flaws and more. Every time I got in the car, it sank an inch and the springs complained and then bounced. The seat had a rod that had so little padding that a horizontal line would wear through my pants if I drove too long.

  If I had taken the purchase price of my Dodge, withdrawn it in pennies, and then shoved them up my ass one at a time, it would have been less painful than my Dodge.

  But, at least I had a car.

  My father called me one Thursday evening and said he had an emergency. When I got to his house, he was out of hotdog rolls. That was his emergency. He needed a lift to the Mini-Mart for hotdog rolls.