Apocalypticon (34 page)

14.

Calico shook out the last few drops and zipped up his fly. The steaming urine had left a Pollack trail in the hot ashes. “Find anything?” he hollered over to the group of Red Caps digging through the rubble.

“Something in the basement,” one of them said, wiping a sooty forearm against his brow. “Bodies, looks like.”

Calico grinned his sharp-toothed grin and began dancing little circles in the ruins. “Not our boys, I hope. Ain’t no fun in that.” Two Red Caps burst through the charred storm door like resurfacing miners. They heaved two brittle corpses onto the cold ground. The second one popped into pieces when it hit the earth. The head jerked loose and rolled over to a bearded man on the perimeter, who stopped it with his boot and stared down at it with calm, disinterested eyes while Calico examined the torso. “Naw, them ain’t our boys,” he said with a smile. “Them’s too old. One’ve ‘em’s a woman. Piker, you wanna let ‘er make a man outta you?” The other men laughed. The one called Piker turned dark red. “Go on, boy, take ‘er in the woods, we won’t watch none.” He picked up a splintered piece of lumber, charred with fire and glowing red embers at the tip, and pointed it at the family huddled together in the lawn. “Why you got two dead bodies rottin’ in your basement, there, friend?”

“Those are my associates,” Warren wept. “You’ve killed them!”

Calico squinted through his mismatched eyes. “Crazier ‘n a shithouse rat,” he muttered. The bearded man on the perimeter gave a curt nod. Calico refocused. “Hey. Shit-rat. I’m gettin’ tired of askin’. Why don’t you tell me where them boys’re headed?”

Warren shook his head. “I don’t know where they’re going, honest. They never said.”

“It’s true,” the woman screamed, “we don’t know anything!” She picked up the folds of her dress and dabbed at the blood running down Warren’s puffy, purpled face. His once-green sweater vest was now a Rorschach of vile crimson. The two children cowered behind them, whimpering and wiping at their little wounds.

Calico shrugged. “Well, hell. We done burned yer house down ‘n’ raped yer wife. I reckon you’d’a told us by now if ya did know it. Guess we’ll keep goin’ the way we’re goin’.” He danced over to the frightened family, burning stick in hand. He did a little jig, then jammed the wooden poker through Warren’s left eye. The heat cauterized the wound instantly, and no fluids drained from the man’s seizing brain when Calico yanked the stick back out. He soft-shoed his way over to the little boy and picked him up by the hair. He screamed and scratched at the larger man’s hands, but Calico held tight. “Hey Piker, this one’s live, ‘n’ prolly more yer style. Why dontchoo take
him
back in the woods instead?” He flung the boy into the smoldering rubble. “And what about you, girlie? You gonna be any use for us? You got any grass on the field? Plunkett, check ‘er out. She got grass, play ball.” He tapped her on the head with the gory stick and crossed to the man at the property edge. “Trail says they went southeast. Should be able to track ‘em down easily ‘nuff.”

“Kill the others. I want to move before nightfall. We’re losing ground.”

“Don’t you worry none,” Calico said with a grin. “Ain’t nothin’ ol’ Calico cain’t track.”

•

“Okay, I admit it,” Ben said, pulling his new coat tighter around his shoulders. The temperature had been falling steadily since they’d left the Post-Alignment Brotherhood a week earlier, and even with the new layers they’d swiped from a sparsely stocked Dickey Bub, he was still feeling the chill of chemical winter. “I did it. I ate more Ponch.”

“Ah
ha
!” Patrick cried, whirling around. “I
knew
it!”

“Well, what do you expect? She’s delicious!”

“Someday I’m going to say that to people about you. ‘Yes, I ate my best friend, but what do you expect? He was delicious.’”

“I probably
would
be delicious,” Ben considered. “And if I met with horrible, horrible death, I’d want you to eat me. For the greater good. I would want to make that sacrifice.”

“You might just get your chance,” Patrick said through narrowed eyes. “I’m giving you 3-to-1 odds of waking up tomorrow in my belly.”

“Shh. Be still now, tauntaun Patrick.”

“I’m going to forgive this slight,” Pat decided, “because I think Ponch would have wanted you to be the one to eat her. Almost as much as she would have wanted to not be eaten.”

“A fair assessment.”

Patrick sighed. “What’s done is done. Yoda taught me that. Speaking of Yoda, is it just me, or are we smack dab in the middle of a swamp?” he asked, lifting his foot out of a puddle of thick mud with a sucking
THLOOOP!

“Definitely swamp,” Ben agreed.

“Do you think we’re in Florida yet?”

“I don’t know, Great Navigator Who Gets to Lead the Expedition Because He Knows Lake Michigan Isn’t to the South, what does your magnificent internal compass tell you?”

Patrick stuck his tongue through his lips and squinted into the bright green glow of the mid-morning fog. “My magnificent internal compass tells me that yes, yes we are in Florida. I just Ponce de Leoned the hell out of this state.”

“I bet we’re in Georgia,” Ben said, surveying the land around them. “That looks like a peach tree.”

“You have no idea what a peach tree looks like.”

“Yes I do.”

“What does it look like?”

“Like that.”

“Yes, well, I suppose I set you up for that one, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“You know what I’ve been thinking?” Patrick mused. “If we had a tall staff of just the right height, and a map of Florida, we could put the map on the ground, sit my hand right on top of the staff, and the sun would just burst right through the hole in my palm and show us exactly where to find Orlando, all
Indiana Jones
style.”

Ben furrowed his brow. “Of all the things in the world you could think of, that’s what you’ve been thinking?”

“And you would be Short Round!” Patrick beamed.

“Okay, time to feed you,” Ben said warily. He tossed his knapsack on the ground next to the highway and began rummaging through it.

“I can’t watch you eat Ponch,” Patrick whined, plopping down in the loose gravel of the shoulder. “Every time you take a bite, another piece of my soul will dump a can of gasoline on itself and light a match.”

“Cheer up, she’s almost gone.” Ben pulled out the sack of buffalo meat and tossed it at Patrick’s feet. “That’s the last of her. Go on, I bequeath it to you.”

Patrick frowned. “I’ll have beans, thank you.”

“No, you’ll have Ponch,” Ben said. “Beans’ll keep. We have no idea how long the meat’ll stay fresh, and we’re not letting it go to waste.”

“They smoked it. It’ll keep. It’ll keep longer than your heartless, cannibal teeth.”

“Yeah, they smoked it all right. You know what else they did? Made each other drink frog blood in the hopes they’d all lose their balls and get knocked up by other dudes. They did that, too. They also told you Ponch was fine, when in reality, they’d hacked her to pieces. And you know what else they did? Had rhyme battles. Like a less painful version of
Eight Mile
. And they think a magician’s going to turn them into sparrows. What do you think the odds are that they actually know how to smoke a buffalo?”

“She
does
look a little green,” Patrick admitted, inspecting a strip of meat.

“She’ll probably make us sick, then you can throw her up in effigy. Now eat.” Ben pried open a can of Dole mixed fruit to go along with the last of the bison, and the pair ate their lunch as the yellow mist roiled around them.

“Ponch would want me to be the one to eat her,” Patrick said sadly. “I know I said it was you, but I lied. It’s me. The great Spirit of the Illinois would like Ponch’s buffalo strength to transfer to me rather than anyone else.”

“Is it a problem that I already sucked down 98% of her buffalo strength, then?” Ben asked.

“No, I’ll just have to eat you next.”

Ben was sipping the juices from the bottom of the fruit can when he noticed the road sign across the highway. “Hey, how sure are you that we’re in Florida?”

“Surer every second,” Patrick said, swallowing the last bit of Ponch. “I was only 89% sure before lunch, but as you know, Ponch had excellent directional capabilities, and now with her navigational prowess augmenting my own, I can say that I am 100% certain that we are, in fact, in Florida.”

“Really.”

“Yes, really. I’d stake your reputation on it. Why do you ask?”

“Well, I’m just wondering why Florida would have a state highway sign in the shape of Alabama.” He pointed to the sign. Patrick turned and examined it.

“So much for your reputation,” he grumbled. “Such as it was.”

“You truly are a marvel of...what was it? Navigational prowess.”

“Shut up. Florida’s right over that hill. I can feel it, Ben. And it feels like retirement.”

But Florida was not waiting for them over the next hill. What
was
waiting for them over the next hill was a sign that said
Welcome to Mobile, Alabama.
“Weird name for Florida,” Ben said.

“Well, I’m sure we’re close,” Patrick muttered, fumbling with his bag. He turned away from Ben and dug through the backpack. When Ben moved to approach, Patrick quickly shifted his position to keep Ben’s prying eyes away. “Hey, what’re you doing?” Ben said.

“Nothing, go away.”

“I want to see!” Ben complained.

“I’m looking for my underwear,” Patrick lied.

“You are not!” Ben grabbed Patrick’s shoulder and pulled him off the bag. Patrick turned and swatted with his bad hand, but Ben dodged and dove for the backpack. He snatched it up and peered inside. “An atlas! An atlas?! Where the hell’d you get an atlas?” But the red dots on a few of the maps inside told all. “You stole it from the journalist?!”

“No, I
bought
it from the journalist.”

“With what?”

“With my charm.”

“Wow. She really came out behind on that deal.”

“Well, she didn’t
know
I was buying it from her. But that’s the price of being charmed.”

“I knew you didn’t have an internal compass! I
knew
it! You’re a phony! And even with a map, you got us lost! Mobile, Alabama instead of Florida. You can’t even cheat right!” He flipped to the map of Alabama and scanned the southeast border looking for Mobile, but came up empty. “Is Mobile even
on
this map? His traced his finger along the state until he located it. Then he closed his eyes and dropped the atlas. “You. Fuck.”

“What?” Patrick picked up the map and looked for himself.

“You took us at least three days in the wrong direction!”

Patrick spotted Mobile on the map. “Ah. So I did.” He cleared his throat as he closed the atlas and stuffed it back into his bag. Then he clapped his hands together. “Well! Listen. Don’t think of it as three days in the wrong direction,” he insisted. “Think of it as three extra days that two best friends get to spend together on their last great adventure. Besides, this is great material for my biography.”

“Oh, I’ve got
plenty
of material for your biography.
Plenty
of material. And also, I’m not writing your biography.”

“Who do you think you’re fooling?”

•

Mobile was, to be blunt, a disappointment. “In death as it was in life,” Patrick observed.

“You’ve been here before?” Ben asked.

“No.”

The city was boring and colorless, without even much rubble to give the landscape a bit of flavor. Only one building really stood up against the pale yellow skyline, a weird art deco-modernist hybrid that looked a little like a miniature Empire State Building topped with a conceptual metal flame. Most of the other buildings were squat, ugly, rectangular dwarfs edged with brown weeds and trash-strewn city sidewalks. Even the water was depressingly brown beneath its bobbing yellow dust surface.

The relatively warm gulf air whipped the apocalypse fog away from the bay, giving them a wide panoramic of the ocean down below. Yellow Monkey dust crusted the entire Gulf of Mexico, as far as they could see.

“How much of the ocean do you think got Monkeyed?” Ben asked, indicating the yellow, filmy crust.

“Ben, there’s a stastically significant chance that the entire
world
got Monkeyed.”

“Oh yeah, Nate Silver? How do you figure?”

“Well, when we got bombed, the dust had to have gotten caught in the jet stream, right? Given the average strength and speed of jet stream winds, it should have blown out of the U.S. and into the Atlantic in a matter of weeks. Think back to the second or third week of the apocalypse. Did the fog thin out?”

Ben struggled to remember so far back. “No,” he decided. “No, right? It got worse. Didn’t it? Wait, did it get worse? Maybe it was better. Wait, trick question! It stayed the same?”

“Your powers of observation rival those of even the greatest stick. No, it got worse. I mean, look around you. It’s
constantly
foggy. We actually got more of the chemical compound blowing into the States, which means a new batch originated somewhere in Europe. Or maybe the Balkans. I’m willing to concede that it may have been the Balkans. Those Jamaicans got us good.”