Apocalypticon (36 page)

16.

“He’s fine,” Patrick insisted, blowing steam from the hot mug in his hands. “I told him he should eat some cookies after giving so much blood, but the boy just doesn’t listen.”

“He looks pretty banged up,” said the man from the gate. “And you don’t look so hot yourself. You guys run up against the Carsons?”

Patrick shrugged and sipped his tea. It tasted earthy, like mud and bark with some flower petals thrown in. He picked a splinter of some dark root from his lips and wiped it on his jeans. “We met old man Mighty Mouse at a theater up the road,” he said. “Short guy, dressed like the Joker, not very hospitable.”

“Spiver,” the whole gang said in unison.

“Bat or knife?” asked a somber-looking girl by the fire. Her eyes were large and sad, pale green against the orange light of the flames. She had delicate, pale skin and dirty blonde hair pried back from her face into a long ponytail. She was rail thin, with knobby elbows wrapped around pointy knees. Her wide eyes gave her a look of perpetual sincerity. A long, white scar ran down the right side of her face from temple to chin. Patrick thought she looked like the saddest girl in the world.

“Bat,” he answered. The girl nodded thoughtfully.

The man who had opened the gate clapped his hands together and rubbed them excitedly. His irises were deep brown, but full of light. The corners of his eyes crinkled from years of easy smiles. His brown, curly hair tufted out at all angles, and his beard was splotchy with uneven bristles, but his unkempt appearance somehow served to make him look boyish and playful, despite being maybe 30 years old, by Patrick’s estimation. “All right! Introductions. I’m James, and that’s my sister, Annie,” he said, pointing to a freckled firecracker of a redhead on the other side of the room. She smiled with all of her teeth.

“That’s an excellent name!” Patrick said, giving her a small nod.

“Ugh, I hate it,” she soured. “It sounds like a West Virginian prostitute’s name.”

“It was my wife’s name,” Patrick pointed out. James coughed lightly.

Annie leaned forward. “Was she from West Virginia?”

“And this is Sarah,” James hastily interrupted, motioning to the sad looking girl by the fire. Patrick nodded hello, but she only blinked at him. “And this dislikable fellow,” James said, clapping the man next to him on the back, “we call Dylan. He won’t tell us his real name.” Dylan appeared to be the source of a sour, faintly herbal scent in the air. A thin, tightly wrapped joint hung from his lips, its gray smoke twirling toward the ceiling. He was easily the oldest member of the group, his graying hair pulled off his forehead with a wide bandana. His eyes were hidden behind small, dark, circular lenses. He was more or less clean-shaven, with rough stubble coating a small portion of his jaw. He wore loose, faded clothing of indeterminable material. An odd tic claimed his left hand; he clenched his fist, opened it, wiggled his fingers, then clenched again, opened again, wiggled again, over and over, incessantly.

“Dylan, as in Bob?” Patrick guessed.

“Dylan, as in anyone but Thomas,” the older man said in a gravelly voice, rough from years of inhaling God knows what. “Welsh fucks, cattle bleeders and sheep stickers,” he muttered. He took a long pull on his joint.

“You’re not Welsh, are you?” Annie asked with a grin.

“I’ve never bled a cow in my life,” Patrick pledged.

“Our resident Dominican friend Amsalu is around here somewhere,” James continued. “Probably out on one of his little getaways. He’ll be back. You’ll meet him later. And that’s it these days! A colony of five.”

“Will you stop calling us that?” Annie groaned. “You make it sound like a reality show.”

James smiled his easy, lopsided smile. “Sorry for my sister. She’s socially retarded.” Annie slugged him in the shoulder. “And physically abusive,” he added.

“You’re more anti-Annie than actual Annie,” Patrick decided.

She opened her mouth to defend this accusation, then stopped, considered, and finally nodded. “I can roll with that.”

“Well. It’s nice to meet you all, up to and including anti-Annie. I’m Patrick, and that poor sod snoring away in the corner is my friend, Ben. Thanks for taking us in. Between the bat beating and the hurricane, we were pretty much ready to call it a life.”

“Hurricane? This?” Annie asked, jerking a thumb toward the window. “Ha! This is a spring drizzle.”

“You haven’t spent much time in the Gulf, huh?” James asked. “These storms pop up pretty much every day. They come in hard and fast, then they’re gone thirty minutes later. You’ll see. Should be wrapping up any minute, now.”

“I’m a St. Louis-Chicago hybrid,” Patrick admitted. “I know very few things about the Gulf. You need some lake effect snow information, though, I’m your man. Are you two from the Gulf? You don’t have the accent.”

“We’re from Iowa, originally. But we both went to Tulane. We blew around a bit after Katrina, but found ourselves back here after the Big Bombing.”

Annie rolled her eyes. “Leave it to my brother to find us a military fort after the apocalypse.”

“Oh, what, you’re complaining?” James teased.

“Which part of St. Louis are you from?” Sarah asked, hugging her knees tightly to her chest.

“Jeff County. One of the lucky few who escaped without a mullet.”

“I’m from St. Charles,” she said quietly, her green eyes clouded with memory. Patrick waited for her to continue, but she had nothing more to say.

“I liked St. Charles,” he said, acutely aware of the statement’s insufficiency. “What about you, Dylan? What part of the Midwest are you from?”

Dylan sucked on the joint and held the smoke deep in his lungs. “Midwest?” he squeaked, small grey puffs escaping from his mouth. He beat his chest three times with his stable hand and exhaled a long, twisting serpent of smoke. “Do I look like I patch-fuck gun barrels and self-pleasure pie?”

Patrick cocked an ear toward him, thinking maybe he’d misheard. “Sorry?”

“I’m not from the Midwest,” he said, shaking his head lazily. He said the word
Midwest
like one might say the word
disgusting
when referring to a particularly perverse and heinous joke. He reached into the cloud of smoke with his twitching left hand and scattered the wisps to the ceiling. “I’m from the Land of Koonoo, man, in the Valley of Pity and Lust.”

“His accent is Pittsburghese,” Annie said. “Maybe Philly. But I don’t know. He’s pretty dickish, even for Philly.”

“What are you smoking?” Patrick asked, enchanted by the madman’s nonsensical responses.

“Ash,” he answered, stubbing out the last few centimeters of the joint. He reached into the front pocket of his oversized shirt and pulled out a small, battered tin with a rusty hinge lid and passed it over to Patrick. It appeared to be an old-fashioned tobacco tin, apparently licensed by way of some gross oversight on the part of Jim Henson’s marketing team. The familiar white carnival letters of
The Muppet Show
were now yellowed to match the sour orange hue of the logo background. A cartoon Kermit sat in the
O
of
Show
, his little green head propped up on green toothpick arms. If the very existence of a Muppet tobacco tin was surprising, then the racy drawing of a completely nude Miss Piggy with a human woman’s body on the underside of the lid was outright troubling. “Peekaboo box,” Dylan explained, wiggling his fingers. “Peekaboo.”

The drug inside was indeed a grey, flaky ash, cut with wild lavender, grass clippings, and a dark, brittle bark that smelled like mushrooms. Patrick admired the mixture with what he considered to be the appropriate combination of horror and awe. “I didn’t know you could smoke ashes.”

“With enough flame, will, and puddle-fucks, you can smoke anything you set your mind too,” Dylan said, gesturing for Patrick to return the tin. “This isn’t a drug, man. This is rollable education. This is the universe and all its parts siphoned through the dusty trumpets of the Tree of Knowledge. This ash, man. This ash is
life
.”

Patrick nodded. “I can tell it’s very nurturing.”

“It’s why I have the age of the spirit. I will smoke this on your graves,” he said, rolling another joint.

James shook his head and grinned. “So you can see why we like to keep Dylan around,” he said, patting the old stoner on the back. “Don’t mind him too much. In some of his more lucid moments, he’s admitted to being an undertaker in his former life. Says he used to ‘do a lot of embalming fluid.’ I have no idea how on earth someone might ‘do’ embalming fluid. But it doesn’t seem to have preserved his brain so well.”

“Embalming fluid!” Patrick started. He raised his eyebrows at Ben. “That might just explain a thing or two.” Ben grimaced.

Just then, James held up a finger and pricked up his ears. “Hey, check it out! The rain stopped.” He hopped up and threw open the front door. Sure enough, the air was once again calm. The violent winds had whipped away the Monkey fog, and Patrick could actually see thin gray clouds overhead. Annie bounced to her feet and raced out the door. Sarah remained near the fire, stroking her long hair thoughtfully. James beckoned to Patrick. “Come on, I’ll give you a tour of the place.” Ben was still snoring away peacefully on the cot, so Patrick shrugged and followed his host.

Now that the world was lighter, Patrick could see that the building in which they had been sitting was just one in a row of low apartments built up against the wall of the fort. “All these buildings were here when we found it,” James explained. “I guess that’s pretty obvious. Like we’re gonna build row houses, right? They’re all pretty much the same. We use a few of ‘em, mostly storage and stuff. We keep a few empty, in case more people drop by. You guys can have the second from the end there, if you want. I mean, you don’t have to, you can do whatever you want, that one’s just a really cozy one. Some of them have drafts, you know, but that one’s pretty nice.”

“Which one has the hot tub?”

“Oh, we just had all those taken out. Low efficiency. If you want, though, the Gulf gets pretty warm in the afternoon. 40 degrees, easy.”

“Hm. Got anything less tropical?”

“Sorry. That’s the problem with being a post-Doomsday resort. We don’t offer anything less than the absolute best.”

James took him around the perimeter of the wall and pointed out a few stone foundations of buildings that seemed to be original to the fort. “I don’t know if they fell down because of Doomsday, or if they’d been down for a century. We stay away from ‘em, though. Out of respect.”

Patrick nodded. “Respect for the fallen. Stones.”

James shrugged. “Any time a massive structure falls down, I assume someone got killed in the process.”

“Safe bet. I’ll tell Ben not to desecrate the area.”

“Thanks. We actually have a great desecration area right outside the walls there, lots of sticks and shovels for ruining stuff. He’ll love it.”

“Perfect!”

James clapped Patrick on the shoulder and spun him around to face the center courtyard. “And this,” he said proudly, “is the heart and soul of Fort Doom.”

“You named this place Fort Doom?” 

“It seemed appropriate,” James shrugged.

“That is a
fantastic
name.”

“Thanks.”

“Sorry to interrupt. You were saying? Heart and soul?”

“Yes! Hold on, let’s do another take. Get the drama going. Turn back around.” They did, and James once again put his hand on Patrick’s shoulder and spun him toward the center. “And this,” he said proudly, “is the heart and soul of Fort Doom.”

Patrick gasped and applauded enthusiastically. Of course, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t noticed the massive swath of garden as soon as they stepped out of the living quarters. The vegetation accounted for 80% of the space within the fort’s walls. It was hard to miss. Cabbages, carrots, potatoes, onions, and a dozen other cold weather vegetables grew evenly spaced in long, neat rows. There was enough food in the ground to keep the little group of gardeners in meals for eight or nine months, with a little conservation. It was the first organized agricultural project Patrick had seen since M-Day, and it was truly an applause-worthy sight.

“It’s incredible,” he admitted. “How long have you been doing this? I mean, is it safe? What with the poison chemical gas and all?”

“Pfft. Poison chemical gas, schmoison chemical gas,” James said with his easy grin. “Actually, we were pretty worried about the first crop. Obviously we didn’t die from the airborne gas, but once it got into the soil, who knows how concentrated it got, you know? We actually drew straws to see who’d eat the first carrot to see if it’d have any negative effect when he ate it.”

“Who won that lottery?”

“Dylan. He was the first to try it.”

“How on earth would you know if it harmed him?”

“Exactly! Ha! He ate it and was just as weird as ever, but shit. So we drew again, a guy that used to be with us, Turk, he tried a potato, and five days later, he was still fine. We’ve been farmers ever since.”

“Put in a few sheep and an outhouse, and you’d never have to leave the fort,” Patrick said.

James snapped his fingers. “That’s what I forgot! The last room on the end there is the outhouse.”

“Ah! Good to know.”

“Yeah. You don’t want to sleep in that one.”

Patrick toed the dirt piled high around the flowering cabbages at his feet. “Not bad dirt, all things considered.” It wasn’t exactly potting soil, but it was rich enough, and moister than he’d expected. He nodded toward a patch of wilting carrots two rows over. “Any idea why some of these aren’t coming in so well?”