Soul's Road: A Fiction Collection (19 page)

She wishes for the same kind of luck, or at least the good sense to leave instead of taking the two men down and laying them out for the birds.

The Open sign on the door of “Al’s Hot Dogs” is flickering on-off, R.E.M. sleep, almost Nightswimming but more like Texarcana, the red-orange of the thing dim and distant against the restaurant’s unlit interior. The hunger in her gut knots in all the old ways; walking here was a day’s venture and she wants more than just fruit-in-the-can. She’s saving the pineapple; she believes it’s important, pineapple, to eat it bit by bit because she met a man with scurvy once. He thought it was a sign of what he gave up to achieve his transcendental strength. He died of fever.

The shades flutter in the wind, shattered glass windows angular and hateful. The girl can smell hot dogs, real and smoking, and she rubs the dent as she walks in.

***

Her flashlight is the kind you crank to wind up, and as it illuminates the dimness of the diner she sees overturned napkin-dispensers, scattered ketchup bottles; brown stains on the wall and a skeletal hand holding the remains of an apron.

There’s pork popping slowly in the distant backroom and she walks over to the kitchen door – it and the hand, however, are in the same general space and as she steps on the hand the brittle bones crunch down into chalk-powder. Her eyes close with all the scorn an eighteen-year-old-girl can muster.

She holds her breath, listening for anything behind the door. The smell leaks under it and into her nose and she wants the food something fierce; she licks her lips and even puts away the MP3 player, just for the seconds she is living at this moment, and looks around. The girl finds decayed stool legs she could break off, jagged rusted pipes she could donate some skin to, and a spatula. The pipes are badly warped and ripped, melted at the edges like someone carefully soldered them open. The structure is arranged just like the one at the hospital, wrapped around a slightly-grayed cooler, and the evidence of complex tool use throws her off; she feels taboo, touching the cage, and picks up the spatula. In the flashlight’s beam it is tawdry; the girl spits on it and shines it with her shirt. Now glimmering; she could barter it to the freaks if she can play into their world and convince them it’s whatever they need it to be.

Or she could hit them with a spatula. Regardless, she’s going to have a goddamn hotdog.

***

The kitchen door whines open slowly, low-pitched and miserable, and she stands in the frame with a prominent wince; another ten heartbeats and she lets the door swing closed as she ducks behind the nearest piece of furniture; a cabinet with dishes still stacked within, rot slowly creeping up the side.

Her flashlight is off and already re-wound; there’s no point in being loud as well as noisy. She brandishes the spatula like an axe.

“Who goes there,” a man bellows from the back of the room, and she wonders whether it indicates an aging love of the dramatic or a bygone obsession with fantasy. It is important, because she’s rather concerned with whether she’s going to be talking to someone cogent (unlikely) or someone who thinks he’s a dragon (probable).

She rethinks the situation; the tone suggested giant, and the darkness suggests lair. She is confident that she can take a giant; most of them end up being crybabies and they suffer a fatal logic crash when undernourished little her manages, despite their infinite height, to wail on their genitalia all the same.

A quick slide and duck puts her behind the old burners, and kneeling she hears a man’s thick breath. The popping and sizzling is close now; her tongue becomes slick and the sides of her mouth run. “Show yourself, meat” he calls; maybe giant, maybe troll, and the girl tries to keep her hands from shaking. If it is a Chimera, she is running, and she is not looking back; she will happily eat beans for a whole year, every meal, if it will just not be a Chimera.

Footsteps crunch closer and, pressed against the long stove, she walks on her knees. The girl peeks around the moldered edge, ambience revealing the silhouette of a man hunched forward, dragging an intricately-tied lattice of mop heads in one hand. He looks slowly around and lets his mouth lull open, and the girl thrusts the spatula out from behind the burner, tucks her head back in, and turns the flashlight onto the shining instrument.

He shrieks and she hears pots and pans fly; he yells about Holy Light and the Judgment of the Gods; of the Man of Virtue and he runs down the other side of the kitchen and out into the dimming daylight. Triumphant, the girl laughs and walks to the back door. She is flipping the spatula as she slides past the pantry door from which the greasy, pork-fried smell emanates and turns her torch on.

Inside is a singed and burning man hooked up to a car battery.

***

Let me tell you how the world ended.

It wasn’t fiery or brilliant or absolute nuclear devastation. No one flipped out like a crazy-faced gorilla and eye-screwed the nation closest their poverty-stricken bedpan. No one even blew out their rectum in a world-class rage-spasm and tried to ventilate the planet with a new air duct, something with one side maybe under New York or London, the other China. No, all the friendly-buddy-buddy countries got together and ganged up on the whack-jobs, the psycho-pants, the ass-hats, and with a couple quick coups and some well-funded revolutions, World Peace was snatched up and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. The U.N. funded technology, medicine, science and the Empirical Foundation for the Proof of God’s Existence; there was a computer which made an equation for world hunger (and another which solved it). They terraformed the desert and grew corn at the hallowed paws of the Sphinx.

I counted down.

The world decided to lean back and watch its stories on the screen and the world decided to try and live those stories and the world made them convincing; pretty damn, in retrospect.

I said zero.

Now, I sit on top of the Sears Tower with a margarita and a sniper rifle because, hey, I might as well be God. The world ended. Who the fuck is going to say otherwise.

1-1

Logic crashes are tricky things and she knows it. It is not safe, it is deconstructive, to prove to a freak that the world they are living in is not the world they see. The ones who take it well simply shut down, unable to handle two at once, and they are dragged back kicking and screaming to the moment they fractured, to the Grand Crash, when they were laying in their beds and their pods and their entertainment centers, laying or living when the limits on the I-T feed were universally turned to an all-time low and brains fried out over the course of fifteen saccharine seconds, synapses crackling like bacon on a skillet as the mind took all that beatific sensory input and finally admitted to itself “I can’t tell which is real, but I can tell which is more attractive; that’s the right one, definitely right.”

If people knew, maybe, who had done it, they’d have flogged and flayed the hacker responsible, but now, only the hacker himself knows. She wonders, at times, if that hacker is a good person, or if they let the world become singed out of malice, but she can’t imagine that kind of purpose.

She has scars, from bad logic crashes, from the biting and the scratching and the one time a man who wanted to be an Elf pulled a knife on her; she has maps on her body of just how badly people deny the world because, really, how can what they see not be what’s there?

The girl is sitting outside of “Al’s Hot Dogs,” weary and burned; both her emotions and nose-hairs. After five precious minutes of power spent from a reader looking up how to safely handle a car battery, she decided the best course of action was to gingerly remove the metal clamps with the nearby rubber gloves which were, of course, entirely out of place.

She is not sure if they belonged to the man with the mops, but she’s keeping them all the same: good, thick, black rubber gloves come in handy.

It was only once she had dragged him, what was left of him, outside that she took the gloves off and realized that the ash would darken her clothes for quite a while afterwards, and she made the very conscious decision to close his eyes anyway rather than leave them open and blue, mismatched against the cracked skin. She doesn’t want to waste water, washing herself, washing him off, but it won’t all brush away and she’s rather put off by carrying him around like this. At least, she supposes, she’s seen some pretty terrible things; a man plus a car battery isn’t the worst, no, and at least she’ll be able to put it all out of mind with his eyes closed or; rather; with what is left of him and his eyes closed, but no.

The corpse sticks with her on the walk.

***

She does not make it before nightfall.

She has spent her life sleeping through buildings, some well-aged, others diseased; some spiritless, others awake with freaks talking and living and treating it as something it is not, but at least then there was something over her head.

She does not make it back to the edge of the city and she doesn’t know what to do, without the skyscrapers there to wear the stars, and she finds the largest rock she can – a boulder left from whoever-knows-when, and she curls up against it in the cold.

She closes her blanket around herself so the edges won’t writhe in the wind and she thinks she’ll be safe from the dogs this far out. She is not sad, no, just alone; this is what she tells herself. With headphones firmly on her ears and the sleep-timer set to half-an-hour, she puts her music just over the wind and listens to Rylynn, Ghosts, God Bless These Dead Marines. Things which don’t remind her of silence.

***

Light punches her in the eyelids until she gets up, stretching and cradling the player close to herself. She decides it’s going to be a good day, and seals the proclamation with Rylnn again: though it does not sound the same, under the sun.

Breakfast is beans.

She tosses the can down the hill, and watches it roll and clink, angling itself strangely until it jumps off a rock and clatters somewhere she does not see.

The girl rolls up her blanket and latches it to her backpack, slides the player into her bandoleer with the other seven, one now empty of power, and cradles her headphones around her neck. She stands, stretches again, looks at the sky and feels the wind against her coat and her skin.

The city looms half-full, buildings scythed by rain and demolition and she wonders what the huge tower standing above every other building is. She’d like to maybe look it up, but she knows it isn’t the Empire State Building – that’s in her Encyclopedias – so she just accepts that it is huge, parts of it gutted, and that it is at the center of all things, of all the debris and looted apartments and stumbling trash, and that she’ll not have to step inside.

Even from here, the vines which pour out from some of the floors are vivid.

She is trying to get more of the ash off her body; the wind is hitting her right side and as she brushes furiously the ashes become little black motes, swimming off. She keeps working at it. It is when she decides it is good enough, lifting her shirt and scratching at the stomach-itches which come from being unbathed, that she feels quite ill-at-ease, and the smell of burning is back, then something like rancid meat and maybe smoke, and she looks to her right to see the man with the mops barreling towards her.

***

Running is the thing people do when they have no other ideas.

Running is one of the fundamental expressions of what it means to be human: “I want to cling to life, cling to or embrace fully, and if I stay here I may not be able to ever lay down with life again and make whispers, lovingly.”

Running is unfortunately a preclusion-activity, when one is running there is not much else one can do except run. Other options include: look forward, look back; veer.

Running is what she is doing when she vaults over a concrete barrier and falls twenty feet.

1-0-0

Wake up, brush teeth, shave, make breakfast; regret pouring juice after brushing teeth, drink it anyway; eggs and toast; dress out of jammies and into gear, tune goggles, load rifle, load pistol, oil knife, shine shoes, fill flask: ready for the day.

I guess people never change.

***

Underneath the rusted out car frame the girl finds she has to bite her backpack. She cannot scream, because she doesn’t know if the man with the mops is gone, and so she waits under the half-collapsed frame, old metal digging into her, face red.

After she guesses he is gone, she decides it hasn’t been long enough, and she counts to 60, ten times.

She crawls out and stands and then slumps back down on the twisted ankle. The car helps this time, creaking under her meager weight; she limps into the garage.

There is nothing to use as a crutch; everything taken in the long ago, but she tries again: the table is still there, empty and light enough to flip over. She takes her screwdriver out from her pack and undoes the screws attaching leg to body and, then: a cane.

She checks the door inside: locked, and so she sits in the corner next to it, breathing, trying to massage the pain off her foot, and then she checks herself and screams.

***

The goggles are great. Finest find I ever had; genuine military-grade night-vision binocular HUD temperature-sensitive infra-red water-proofed goggles. The original owner, an unfortunate marine, had gone Freak. I was learning how to shoot at the time so the work was sloppy, but enough bullets in the chest will put anyone down. For the record, one bullet in the chest is enough. I used four.

Of course, I added an antenna to the goggles, and used my now-stolen soldering iron to add some studs. Everyone needs a style.

Stolen is the wrong word; it was give that or my life to the Spike Cannibal, and I’d prefer my insides to stay hermetically sealed for as long as possible. I’m pretty sure he puts scalps in those mops, but that’s not really anything I’ve been able to investigate.