Mom was tuned to the virus way before the news started talking about it nonstop. We already had tons of canned goods in the garage thanks to her belief of being prepared, alongside a bunch of freeze-dried stuff the guys and I still weren’t desperate enough to try. When people finally realized how serious the whole thing was and rushed the grocery stores, trying to stock up on bottled water and toilet paper, I was set. Even had a tent, a generator and first aid kits in every room of the house. “I told you this was coming, mijo,” she said as she squatted by a box of pasta and wiped it down before bringing it into the kitchen. “I know you laughed at me, but we’re going to survive because of me.”
I think about her and the brain aneurysm she never had a chance to prepare for as I walk over to the commercial freezer the guys and I dragged into the kitchen when they moved in with me. The padlock hanging from the door’s latch is cold to the touch, and I wait a few moments for my hand to warm it up enough to loosen the dials, the numbers to the combination in my head before my finger grazes the first dial.
The inside of the freezer is a foodie’s paradise, so long as the foodie in question has lowered their standards to the new reality. One side is lined with Big Macs, the burgers taken out of their cardboard packaging and individually placed inside their own, separate Ziploc bags. Carefully stacked one atop the other, they reach to the top of the freezer, like a wall of heart attacks waiting to happen. We also got burgers from Wendy’s, Burger King, and a couple other places, though none sell as good as Mickey D’s. Next to the burgers, we have our international section. We’re talking cartons of lo mein, orange chicken and honey shrimp from the Panda, two big pans of pasta from Olive Garden, and an assortment of tacos, frozen burritos and plates of nachos from Mexican restaurants. And Taco Bell.
Two tubs, both the size of bowling balls, are stacked atop each other, one filled with frozen special sauce, and the other with spicy ketchup. Even got a couple of frozen Szechuan sauce packets, ‘cause it might be the apocalypse, but there are still Rick and Morty fans out there. Everything is carefully labeled, documenting the restaurant it came from and when it was bought. Best way to piss off a customer is to bring them the wrong order. Most of them are already angry at us for the prices charged, so you want to make sure you get their order right. Especially ‘cause by this point, we’re pretty much their only option.
It’s how I figured things would go. When the guys moved in, I told them my plan, and we spent the next few weeks going to all the fast food places and restaurants we could think of, buying up as much of their inventory as possible. Afterwards, we just sat on the stuff, waiting for the gold arches to fall down and the Taco Bell to stop ringing. When that happened, we put the word out that you could still get your artery-clogging fix through us.
I finish taking stock of the contents of the fridge and make a mental note to move some stuff over from the other freezer we have running in the garage. Locking the freezer, I grab a bag of regular pork rinds from the pantry, along with two bottles of water, and head back to the living room. The pork rinds I toss to Dwayne, who catches them with both hands and tears the bag open. Taking a seat on the sofa next to Carlos, I drink from the water bottle and watch him.
His eyes are glued to the television, tracking the little green guy as he moves through a pixelated maze, occasionally swatting at enemies with what I imagine is meant to be a sword. Either that or the game is a lot more interesting than I gave it credit for. Carlos sits on the edge of the sofa, hunched over like he’s on the toilet squeezing a big one out, holding the controller tightly in both hands. His right foot taps a tempo on the carpet, and when I glance down, I note the red stains on his tennis shoes.
“We need to talk about what happened,” I tell Carlos, reaching for the controller.
“Yeah,” Dwayne adds, his mouth full of pork rinds. “Tell us how you offed the dude.”
I shoot him a look. I had hoped the pork rinds would keep him from talking. Then I turn back to Carlos and put my hand on the controller. “Come on, Chuck, talk to us.”
Chuck. His old nickname, the one he decided on when he got really into X-Men comics. Why he’d pick a bald dude who couldn’t walk as his role model I’ll never quite get, but that was Carlos for you, then and now.
Carlos doesn’t look at me, just keeps on playing.
“Fuck this,” Dwayne says. Rolling off the bean bag chair, he crawls on all fours to the entertainment unit, and before Carlos or I can stop him, reaches behind the Nintendo console and rips out the power cord. The little green dude, who I think Carlos managed to get all the way to the end boss, is instantly swallowed up by gray static. Carlos blinks once, then twice, but otherwise continues to stare at the television, and I wonder if, like my PlayStation, he’s beyond bringing back.
Tossing the power cord against the wall, Dwayne walks over to Carlos and swats the controller from his hands. “Stop acting like a retard and tell us what happened.”
I’m in Dwayne’s face in an instant. “Watch it,” I tell him. Funny how fast I slip into my old playground role again.
The smell of pork rinds and built-up tension wedges between Dwayne and me as we stare each other down. It’s a dumb thing to do, I know, both of us jockeying for a position that no longer matters, but it’s hard to let go of all the high school crap, you know? I look at Dwayne and think of all the times he acted like he was better than Carlos and me, or made a crack about Carlos’s weight or my mom, always followed by Shit, you guys can’t take a joke when one of us would get butthurt over his comments and call him on it.
“Move,” Dwayne says, his face set with the same determined look he used to get on the track field as he waited for the starting gun to go off.
“Nuh-uh.” I think about telling him he has pork-rind dust all over his upper lip, a mustache of fried pig particles.
“He,” Dwayne points at Carlos, and damn it, I flinch when he moves his hand to do so, “needs to talk, and you,” he pokes me with his other hand, “need to stop babysitting him. The guy just goes off and kills our best client and then comes back and parks his gigantic ass on the sofa to play his stupid game and we’re supposed to just be all, ‘Well, that’s okay, little buddy, you’ll talk to us when you’re ready.’” He shakes his head and looks at Carlos. “Fuck. That.”
I’ve fought Dwayne three times in the eight years we’ve known each other. First time happened in fifth grade, when Dwayne found out I liked wrestling and called it, and by extension me, gay. Second time happened four years later, when we found out we both liked Becky Rogers and he went behind my back and asked her out, even though he 100 percent said he wouldn’t and I’d called dibs. Third time was right before the virus made everything to go in lockdown, when, drunk off some beers he’d taken from his dad’s stash, he asked me if I ever worry that my brain was as fucked as my mom’s. I lost all three fights, the first one ending with me on the ground and my Mankind figure broken in half. Second time, I had a bloody nose and no date for the dance. Last time, he gave me a black eye and a mumbled apology the day after.
I think about this because I’m pretty sure we’re seconds away from our fourth fight, and if I’m being honest, I think my chances to win are about the same as all the other times. My hand is balled into a fist, nails digging into my skin, and I’m considering kneeing him in the groin to give me better odds when Carlos speaks up:
“I’ll tell you.”
Carlos tells us the story in a rapid, hushed voice, having to stop several times to catch his breath. He remains seated on the edge of the sofa, his right foot tapping up a beat while he rubs his hands on his jeans and makes me wish I could hand him the controller just so he has something else to do with them.
“It was, you know, it was a big order, right? One of our biggest ones, I think.” He stops and looks at me for confirmation, and I nod. Because yeah, when Larry called me up the other day, I had to get a pen and paper to write down what he wanted. Usually, when folks reach out to us, it’s for a burger, two may
be. But Larry was ordering like he’d just taken a really good hit of weed and was at the drive-thru line of Taco Bell.
I reminded Larry that, unlike Taco Bell, we didn’t have no ninety-cent menu. The stuff he was rattling off would cost him. Just the In-and-Out Burger alone would set him back a couple of presidents. Larry just laughed that long, wheezy laugh of his, the one that made you want to put a hand over his mouth and have him swallow whatever he thought was funny. “Amigo, when have I not been good for it?”
God, Larry was such an asshole. Then again, if I was the hometown football hero, prom king and the one and only cum stain of Ted Drake, owner of a bunch of drive-thru Daiquiri stands across Houston, I might be an asshole, too. It was Larry’s lineage, and nothing else, that kept me on the phone with him. Everyone knew Mr. Drake was loaded, thanks to his stands using Mad Dog for the drinks and having a rep for not checking IDs too carefully, making them popular with everyone in our school. I didn’t even think the lockdown stuff affected them. In fact, it probably helped them. What else was there to do at home than get drunk off cheap, super-sweet, route 44-size drinks? And the drive-thru meant you were still doing the whole social distancing thing.
“Man, remember when we couldn’t get near Larry’s bougie neighborhood without that security guard threatening to call the cops?” Dwayne asks me, already forgetting how close we came to fighting. “Anyone watching the place nowadays?” He asks Carlos.
Carlos shakes his head. “I don’t think so. No one stopped me when I drove in.”
Dwayne’s eyes glimmered with a stupidity I knew was coming. “We should go and get one of those houses. Eminem Domain the living shit out of it, yeah?”
“Eminent,” Carlos mutters, before continuing. “I get to his place and after I get the stuff unloaded, I ring the doorbell and wait.” Carlos is back to staring at the television, and I feel bad. He and Dwayne both pushed for me to accept the PayPal, but I convinced them cash was the way to go. “We want to have cash on hand,” I believe were my—or if we want to be honest here—my mom’s exact words.
“The door opens, and I’m expecting Larry—”
“So you could fuck him up for all the times he shoved you in the hall!” Dwayne walks up to Carlos and places two of his fingers on his temple, as if they were the barrel of a gun. “BLAM,” he says, using the fingers of his other hand to mime blood spurting from the side of his head.
Carlos ignores him. “But it’s a girl. I think maybe she went to our school?”
“Was she hot?” Dwayne wants to know.
Blushing, Carlos looks down and nods. “She was pretty. Nice too, asked me how I was doing and saying how I, I mean, we were providing a cool service to folks. She takes the food to kitchen, and it takes her a couple of trips, cause there’s a lot. After the last one, she comes back with her purse, and I have my Ziploc bag ready to have her put the cash in, just like you told me, Luis, when we hear yelling coming from the kitchen. It’s Larry, he’s calling the girl—he called her Kristin—over. And Kristin, she kinda freezes for a second before turning around and heading to the kitchen.”
“Shit, what you do?” Dwayne asks.
Carlo’s lips tremble, and I hate Dwayne for asking the question. But I hate myself more, because now I’m thinking about the gun that my mom kept by her bed and showed me how to fire. “Por si acaso,” she said that first time at the range, the smell of gunpowder burning my nostrils and my ears ringing.
Just in case, I’d told Carlos, showing him how to switch the safety off before sticking it in his waistband. We’d been hearing helicopters overhead nightly for the past week, and supposedly stuff was getting even worse out there.
“What you do?” Dwayne asks again, jabbing Carlos in the shoulder.
“She hadn’t paid me.” His eyes flick to the controller a few feet away. “I followed her inside. Called out, too, but she ignored me. I find them in the kitchen, arguing.” Carlos takes off his glasses and starts to clean them. “That’s not right, ‘cause it’s just Larry shouting and Kristin taking it all. He’s super-pissed, pacing back and forth and screaming about how useless Kristin is, and how she can’t get anything right. The food—our food—is on the table, some of it anyways. A bunch of it is on the floor or splattered against the walls of the kitchen. I don’t think either of them notice me watching them.”
“What was Larry mad about?” I ask.
“The order. How Kristin got it wrong. He kept pointing to the nachos and saying they’re the wrong ones. How there’s not enough guacamole and beans.”
Dwayne, maybe for the first time in his life, stays quiet here.
“Which is dumb, right?” Carlos pauses and looks from Dwayne to me. “It was Larry who placed the order, so if anyone made a mistake, it was him. But Kristin doesn’t say that. She just stays quiet.”
“And you spoke up,” I say. Because of course Carlos would.
He nods. “Larry turns and looks at me. I don’t think he recognizes me, even though we were in the same group in Spanish class, freshman year. He points at me and asks if I’m the one who ate his nachos. And, I don’t know, I guess I didn’t like that. Cause he wasn’t just asking randomly. You could hear it in his voice, the way he looked at me. It was—”
Here Carlos pauses, and I notice the way his eyes glance at Dwayne for just an instant. “It sucked,” he says. “I guess I got mad or something.”
“You got more than mad,” Dwayne mutters, and I wonder if he gets it at all.
Carlos doesn’t respond, and we sit in silence for the next few minutes, the sound of the motor from the freezer scratching my right ear. I think about the story Carlos told us and wonder if this is the end of our business.
“There’s something else,” Carlos says, so quietly I almost don’t hear the next part. “Larry, he doesn’t look good, afterwards, lying on the floor. He’s a lot skinnier than in the ads he used to run on TV. And then I remember how he kept coughing in between yelling at Kristin. I think, I think that’s why she didn’t really shout back or anything and just took it.”
I want to jump off the sofa. I want to burn the sofa. And the living room. And maybe Carlos? Every tidbit, every rumor, every tweet about the virus fills my head. Contagious. Transmittable. In the air. Through contact only. Maybe. Probably. We don’t know.
“Yeah,” Carlos says, putting his glasses back on. “When I sho—when I did what I did, I got blood and stuff on her and me. But she didn’t even freak out at me. Just said something like, ‘At least I can stop wondering if I have it or not.’
I’m staring at Carlos’s shoe, the one with the red stain. I’m thinking of how he came into the house with those shoes on and how we’ve been sitting feet away from each other all day. Then I think about my mom again, about her need to be prepared. For anything.
“Carlos,” I say. “What did you do with the gun?”
By Eryk Pruitt
You carry shoes with you. Some in better shape than others, some brand new. Some are a bit worn and tattered, but still, they would be better than trucking about the dirt roads to and from the ragtag campsite in bare feet, like the Calebites are known to do. You’ve never seen them up close, only from a distance, and have been warned to stay away from them.
“Those dirty hippies up there are dangerous,” your mother used to tell you. “They’re a cult. They do drugs and have unprotected sex, then sell their babies to young mothers with barren wombs.”
Mom also used to tell you to turn the other cheek and do unto others. Dad, on the other hand, never cottoned to that kind of talk.
“They locked themselves away during the outbreak, all those years ago. Most folks had the good sense to get back to work and rejoin society.” Dad would then spit on the ground. “Not the Calebites. They never again stepped foot off that property.”
Their camp is down at the end of a long dirt path that cut through the backwoods, down near the river. You always heard there were nearly twenty of them. Used to be, you and your buddies would dare ea
ch other to breach the campsite, just touch the bumper of the busted RV, first person to make it to the rusted-out station wagon… each time, a little further. Each time, a little deeper in.
You’ve been by three times over the past two weeks. You’ve carried with you sacks of old clothes, some cough syrup, cans of food.
You’ve never seen so much as a soul.
“You ought to steer clear of those Calebites,” said your buddy Gregson. You suppose you’ve known him long as anyone. Most of your other classmates graduated high school and sloughed off to college. Not Gregson. He stayed behind with you to man the counter at the Dairy Mart. “They’re not like you and me. They got themselves a God who says it’s okay to do wrong by other people who don’t believe the way they do.”
“Doesn’t everybody?”
“Their God is different.” Gregson spoke in high pitches, but not when he talked about the Calebites. His voice sunk to near-whispers: “Those ones will make short work of you.”
“They’re people. Just like you and me, I reckon.”
Lately, you have begun to grow into yourself. A small town can fold in on a fella. It can make him do things and think ways he might not, if left alone. There is a common ideal to which all must subscribe and, as of late, you have begun to fill out your shirts, your britches, the shoes on your feet. The words sent forth from your mother, your teachers, the preacher at your church, have all begun to ring hollow. They are keeping something from you. They don’t want you to know everything just yet. You send out for books not kept at the town’s library. You study subjects nobody has ever taught you. Your hometown grows smaller and smaller and you fear that one day you might pop it at the seams and they will have to rend you limb-by-limb, lest you tear the entire place to smithereens.
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