Go-Ready

by Ryan Husk

  How the fuck does the world exist without Margery Cohen in it?

  Not possible.

  He wanted to focus on her. Focus on her hand in his. He sang to her, an inadequate version of “Runnin Down a Dream.” She used to laugh at how off-key he sang. He wanted to focus on that and on the good times, but all he could think of was his burning hatred of the Face and the fact that it had driven them underground away from Margery’s family and friends and posters and music. She shouldn’t be dying here. She should be someplace deserving of the life of Margery Cohen. She deserved better than to die like a rat in a hole, knowing her entire species was going to be wiped out soon after her.

  And here was what worried him the most. He couldn’t be sure when she was dead. Most people assumed death was a sudden thing, easy to call, but in truth it happened in stages. Short of decapitation or a bullet straight to the temple, all death came in stages. Neurons continued to fire and misfire, even as the dying person slipped deeper, deeper, deeper into nothingness. They could cease breathing and yet still be alive, taking in air so slightly that you’d never detect it. You might not detect a pulse, but that only meant it was to faint to feel. Death—absolute death—was difficult to call. Marshall had learned that with his brother twenty years ago, and with his mother six years ago. Doctors only called “time of death” because they had to at some point. Patients could be alive far beyond that called time.

  So, he had to hold her hand. He had to be with her the whole time, even after she stopped breathing and evacuated her bowels and stared vacantly up at the ceiling. He had to hold her hand throughout, so that there was not a moment that she was alone while dying. He kissed her forehead and leaned down to listen whenever he thought she made a sound.

  Behind him, Colt was saying something to Edward and Gordon and the others. “Marshall found her like this. Something finally ruptured in her head, I guess. I don’t know how tumors work, but…I imagine there’s a limit? When the brain gives in? When it all just goes? I dunno.”

  “Marshall?” Wade said. He was standing somewhere nearby. Marshall didn’t know exactly where because he couldn’t look away from his woman. Margery had to see him for as long as she could, before the world went totally dark for her. “Marshall, I’m sorry, pardner. You know she loved you. And she knew you loved her, too.”

  “She ain’t gawn yet,” he muttered.

  Jeb walked up beside Margery, knelt on cracking knees, and put a hand on Marshall’s shoulder. “I’m here, buddy,” was all Jeb said.

  Marshall lifted her hands, kissed both of them, then stroked her hair softly. That usually helped put her to sleep. She would say, “What’re ya doin’, pettin’ me like a damn dog?” He would chuckle and say, “Well, you are a bitch.” And she would punch him. A joke that never got old. And joke that could never be told. Not after today. Not ever again. That was the worst part of death, the loss of all the inside knowledge, the inside jokes, the shared experiences, all the you-had-to-be-theres. When those were gone, when you realized you could never utter them again to an audience that understood, that’s when the real loss hit you.

  That’s when they’re really dead.

  Marshall didn’t know how long it was since the last time he heard her breath. He had heard a wheeze, and maybe a croak a few minutes later. He could no longer feel her breath when he put his fingers to her lips and nose. The others were talking. Janet came in sniffling and sat next to Margery cross-legged. Greta joined her, and they both held hands while Greta muttered a prayer.

  None of it helped Marshall deal. One by one, chambers were shutting down inside Margery’s brain. Bit by bit she was losing all her memories of Marshall, all her memories of everything. He tried to take solace in the fact that she was also losing her memories of the Face and everything it had wrought. It didn’t help. Nothing helped. The pain had to happen and it would come and it would do what it always did.

  Her lips moved. Marshall thought they had, anyway. He leaned down, tried to listen. It was faint. He had to listen hard. Yes, she was definitely trying to force words out. Then, clearly, her lips moved and she said, “Marsh…Marsh…”

  “I’m here, girl. I’m here. Marshall’s here an’ he ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  “Marsh…” She drooled.

  He kissed her forehead. “Marsh is here. Marsh is here. Marsh is here.” He kept saying it.

  “Marsh,” she whispered. “We are a speck of dust, and the fate of the universe.”

  “What?”

  “We are…a speck…”

  “Okay, Margery. Okay, girl. I understand. I’m here and I understand. Shhh, Marsh is here. Marsh is here. Marsh is here.”

  “Blue eyes,” she said. “He’s got those big…big blue eyes…”

  It was maybe an hour later that he began to smell waste. Feces. He knew what that meant. More things shutting down. No one could even help her pass with a modicum of dignity. Marshall held her hands tight and wept. He screamed. And his screams echoed.

  Sometime later—he didn’t know exactly what—someone pried him away from Margery and he stood in a corridor while Edward and Wade explained to Marshall what would be done with the body. They would take her up top for burial. At first Marshall was against that, he didn’t want the ecophage to eventually devour her, too. But Edward explained that they couldn’t bury her down here because they couldn’t dig into the limestone floors, and putting her in any kind of box would only risk the decaying corpse putrefying the air.

  “She’s gotta be buried up top, Marsh,” said Wade. “And she would want it that way. You know it.”

  * * *

  They buried the large woman down the mountain a bit, in a wooded area. Jake didn’t know why they had invited him and Lopez to watch, but he supposed it was just a human gesture. Come see her off, come and partake in one of the last human rituals we have left. Probably it was something like that.

  Jake had helped with the digging. He had done it so that they all saw he was an okay dude. And why shouldn’t they think that? He had seen them looking him askance at times, like they didn’t trust him. Jake had a recollection of how the kids in Mrs. Harrison’s eighth-grade science class had looked at him when he attacked Kyle McCleod, squeezing his neck until the kid turned purple. They had all called him “Psycho Marler” after that. Gave him funny looks, like he was tainted by something. Poisonous to be around.

  Wade and Jeb had looked at him that way while he was digging. Maybe it was because he was whistling while he did it. And why shouldn’t he? He hadn’t known Margery whoever-she-was. He felt sorry for the lady, and the guy Marshall. He did. But hey, life goes on. Or it doesn’t. Because sometimes space invaders take over your planet and eat all the life-forms on it.

  He watched from nearby as she was lowered in the ground. He listened as first the guy Jeb said some words, then Wade. Lopez stood using a large stick for a crane, his leg having been compressed by Edward as best could be expected. The two oldies, Colt and Greta O’Hare, they broke into a pretty sweet rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Jake stuck around long enough for that and then turned and left. This wasn’t his business. Probably more respectful not to intrude, right?

  Jake walked back towards the freight elevator. It rose right up out of the ground like a strange monument to cubes, and it was the only obviously manmade thing around for miles. When the Collinsworth guy built this place, he sure did keep most of the land intact. You wouldn’t even know there was an installation hidden beneath your feet.

  This was only his second day at Silvid, and already Jake was feeling some kind of disappointment. He didn’t know what he’d expected, but he was hoping for something more than this. Maybe the Army would actually be here, with a base of operations he could join up with. This ragtag group of nine—scratch that, eight people was not something he felt was sustainable.

  Jake found a clearing where he could swing his sword. He’d brought his Zweihänder up top just for this reason. Glanced up at the sky to check for the Face. The long b
lack webbing and the tendrils that fluttered out from it in all directions was visible, but no Face. Rebel Fuckin’ News said it was somewhere over Russia, and at its speed it ought not to be around to the U.S. again for another two hours.

  Should be enough time to get a little practice in.

  He took off everything but his pants and shoes, and held the Zweihänder in both fists. It was sunny out, but getting cool. The first hint of autumn. Jake planted his feet in a wide stance, and went through Döbringer form. Taken from a manuscript dated around 1389, the HEMA community had been busy resurrecting it from the ashes of history. The form had big, powerful strikes, along with complex footwork. Jake had probably performed Döbringer a thousand times, he usually liked to knock out twenty reps of it a day.

  Left leg forward and bent. Right leg straight. Sword held up, the hilt tight to the right shoulder. Chest out, proud. Step forward with the right foot and bring down a powerful oberhau (overhead strike). Then step to the left and parry an imaginary opponent’s attack. Parry left, then right. Lunge backward in a deep stance, sword high up in achs (high block, the sword tip facing down) and then thrust towards the imaginary opponent’s head. Shuffle to the left, block high again using achs. Thrust.

  Next, he went through Iron Cross drills created by Italian swordsman Fiore dei Liberi in the fourteenth century. As he trained, sweat rolling down his back and into his eyes, and pushing himself to heft the enormous weapon until his muscles began to turn to jelly, Jake amused himself by thinking of how this ancient martial art was just being resurrected by humans, like a relic taken from a tomb, just when mankind was going through its last downfall. Historians and martial artists around the world had only begun to awaken the old wisdom, and decipher the meaning of crumbling pages and vellum, and then the Face came. Jake imagined many stories around the world were going to end this way. “I had just asked my girlfriend to marry me, and then the Face came.” “I had just gotten the loan from the bank to open the bakery I always wanted, and then the Face came.” “I was just about to fuck the woman of my dreams, and then the Face came.”

  “Jake?”

  He paused, panting, not realizing how focused he had become on the workout, almost to the exclusion of all other sensory input. Jake looked around and saw the girl. Janet. She was standing near a tree, hugging herself tightly. Coming up behind her was the black guy, Gordon. He had barely introduced himself to all of them. They had all been keeping him at arm’s length for the first day, and then after Margery died it seemed no one had any time to talk about anything else. Plus, the whistling. Yeah, the whistling hadn’t helped anyone get to know him.

  “Yeah? What’s up?” he panted, planting the tip of his Zweihänder against a rock beside his foot, and leaning against the handle.

  “You…are you, like, some kinda actor?” Janet asked.

  He laughed. “An actor?”

  “Yeah. I mean…” She gestured at the sword.

  He laughed again. “Nah. It’s just for fun. It’s HEMA.”

  “HEMA?”

  “Historical European Martial Arts.”

  “Oh. Um. That’s a thing?”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  Gordon walked up beside her. “Hey. You okay?”

  “Yeah, why?” she asked.

  “I saw you walking away. Just wanted to check on you.”

  “I just needed to be alone. To, like, think. Ya know?”

  Gordon patted her shoulder. It was almost parental, Jake thought. “Well, all right. Just don’t wander off like that without telling somebody. We all gotta know where everybody’s at.” Gordon glanced up at the sky. Jake had noticed everyone doing that. He figured it was now going to be a permanent human habit, always checking for the Face. If they somehow survived long enough, human beings might continue to evolve with a fear of things above them. Jake had read about chimpanzees having a particular noise they made whenever a large predator was close, signaling the other chimps to leap into trees. And he’d read about certain varmints that made certain squeaks whenever a bird was spotted overhead, signaling other varmints to scramble for cover. Evolution. What was the Face doing to them even now? What changes would be most useful to their survival?

  Gordon nodded to Janet. “All right. Understood. Just let us know where you go.”

  “Ten-four,” Janet said.

  Gordon looked at Jake. “We’re all gonna be headed back inside in a few.”

  Jake nodded. “Just holler at me, I’ll be there.”

  Gordon looked a little uncertain about just leaving them here, but finally gave Janet’s shoulder a pat and walked away.

  “He’s protective, huh?” said Jake.

  Janet shrugged and leaned against a tree. “We’re all we’ve got.”

  We’re all we’ve got. Jake thought that sounded poetic. The girl had unintentionally uttered something a fatalist like Eggers would have written. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps it was kind of optimistic, a sort of happy fatalism like George Carlin might have joked about. We’re all fucked, and we’re all we’ve got. Something like that might have come out of Carlin’s mouth, happy fatalistic fuck that he was.

  Jake hawked up a loogie and spat it out. “How’d you all end up together? You all know each other?”

  “The big bearded guys do,” she said. “And Margery. The Colts are married, obviously. But the rest of us just sort of found one another while we were on the run.”

  “Yeah? All o’ you heard about Silvid, too?”

  “No. That was Edward’s idea.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  “Yeah. He’s, like, super smart about this end-of-the-world stuff. Been prepping for years, coming up with contingency plans and, like, thinkin’ about Silvid Valley for years, I guess.”

  “Is that a fact?”

  Janet nodded, and chuckled wanly. “Probably wouldn’t even be alive if it wasn’t for him.” She pulled an iPhone out of her pocket, turned it on to check something.

  “That thing still work?” Jake asked.

  “We’ve got some chargers, and sometimes I have Gordon plug it into one of the trucks to charge it, or else use one of the outlets down in the cave.”

  “Contact anybody?”

  “Nah. Doesn’t seem like satellites work anymore. Reckon the Face ate them all. I try sending texts but it just says ‘unable to send your text.’ I’ve tried calling my mom and dad…” She trailed off, wiped her eyes. “Tried calling some friends, this boy I know named Jesse. Nothin’. It’s like nobody’s out there.”

  “You know, a few years ago, I was talking to this old guy named Mr. Sanderson. He used to be friends with my grandfather. I grew up around Mr. Sanderson, and he told me lot’s of stories about the old days. Anyways, a few years ago, he tells me about something he called the Silence. He used it to describe how it used to be before everyone had a phone. He said everyone was just used to the idea of the Silence, it wasn’t even something you thought about, it was just the way it was. If someone wasn’t with you—like, say, you were at home and they were out grocery shopping—it was just understood that you could not contact them unless they returned. But the Silence was broken when cellphones came around. Then, for a brief time, the whole world got used to having immediate connections with each other.”

  Jake hefted the sword over his right shoulder, and looked at her.

  “So, what you’re experiencing is something your ancestors did just fine with. For millions of years we wandered the savannah, hunting and foraging, and we always knew the Silence was real. The distance between us could be lessened by a phone call.” He sighed, and looked up at the sky, at all that black webbing. “We’re gonna have to get used to the Silence again. We—”

  He stopped.

  “What?” Janet said.

  He held up his hand. “You hear that?”

  “Hear what?”

  Jake listened. There had been a snap, and then the sound of something wheezing. Close, all around him, yet faint. Janet looked around. Now she heard it, too, he c
ould tell. She was looking around for the source.

  Then something split, like a tree crackling and giving way. Janet screamed, pointing behind him. Jake turned, just in time to see the lumbering hulk coming out of the forest, tearing through the woods and reaching out with chitonous hands and tentacles, random members stretching out from its spine as it unraveled. It looked like a centipede, ten feet tall, maybe more, gray and black and bloated, hemorrhaging black viscous fluids as it gripped trees and ripped them out by their roots.

  It came at Jake with speed, and for a second he knew it was over. All over. Just like that.

  Then, it stumbled. The creature fell to the ground and went through a spasm. One of its tentacles lashed out at the air, hissing past his face and going for Janet. It grabbed her by her leg and she screamed as it turned her upside-down and held her there.

  Terror, acidic and immediate, poured into Jake’s stomach. Without thinking, and without technique, he brought his sword over his head, screaming, and chopped down onto the tentacle with his blade. The black fluid sprayed all over his face and the screech the creature let out nearly deafened him, like a thousand tea kettles steaming all at once.

  But it let go. It dropped Janet on the ground, then planted all of its limbs into the earth and started moving towards him, half crawling, half wriggling like a snake.

  THE END?

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