Apocalypticon (41 page)

19.

The next morning, Patrick awoke with a start. “Something’s amiss,” he said aloud. He didn’t know how he knew it, but he knew it. There was something in the air.

He propped himself up on his elbows and glanced around. Ben was snoring softly in his bunk on the other side of the room. “Ben, wake up,” he yawned. “Something’s amiss.” But Ben was too soundly asleep to answer, so Patrick fell out of bed, stumbled over to the other side of the room, and brought his lips close to Ben’s ears. “
I say, something’s amiss,
” he cried. Ben bolted upright with a scream, slamming his forehead against Patrick’s nose. “Cripes!” Patrick yelled, the front of his face going warm and tingly. His eyes watered. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Me?” Ben demanded. “Why’re you on my face?! Are you kissing me in my sleep?” He shoved Patrick away, then rolled over and burrowed under his blanket. “And why are you waking me up? Let me sleep, it’s Saturday.”

“Is it? Really?”

“If I convince you that it is, will you let me go back to sleep?”

“Absolutely not.” He lifted Ben’s cover and slapped him lightly on the forehead with his palm. “Wake up. Like I said while you were ignoring me in your sleep, something’s amiss.”

“What’s amiss?”

Patrick narrowed his eyes. “
Something
.”

Ben pushed him off the cot. “Okay, well, when you figure out what it is, come wake me. And when you do, bring coffee.”

Patrick gasped and snapped his fingers. “
That’s
what’s amiss!”

“The coffee?”

“The fire! The fire that makes the coffee
coffee
. Listen.” He held up his hand for silence. The only sound was the Gulf wind whistling through the hole in the southern wall that Ben hadn’t quite finished with yet. “Hear that? No crackling fire.”

Ben shrugged. “So go start one.”

“But I don’t
have
to start one. That’s one of the perks of living in Fort Doom. James is always up first, and he always starts the fire. Right?” Ben conceded this was true. In all the weeks they’d been living in Mobile, James had been the first to rise every single day and had, indeed, gotten a good blaze going in the pit. Patrick rubbed at his chin. “Something is definitely amiss.”

“Will you stop saying ‘amiss’?”

“Why? Is it making you feel amiss?”

“Keep it up, and my a-fist isn’t gonna a-miss your face.”

“The apocalypse has made you cranky. Come on, let’s go investigate.”

Ben grumbled his dissent but flung the covers away all the same. They stepped out of the cabin and grimaced against the bright glow of the early morning fog. The yard was completely empty; there wasn’t another soul in sight. The charred logs from last night’s fire lay dark and cold in the ash of the fire pit.

“Maybe he slept in,” Ben offered. “Maybe he thinks it’s Saturday, too.”

They crossed up to James’ cabin, and Patrick knocked gently on the door. There was no response. He knocked a little louder. Still nothing. He pressed his ear to the door. “I don’t hear anything,” he frowned.

“See if it’s unlocked,” Ben whispered.

“You want to just barge in? What if he’s having, like, a private orgy in there? That would be awkward for everyone.”

“With who? His sister?”

“Maybe he picked up some tail at a bar last night in town. And now they’re having a private orgy.”

“If they were having a private orgy, I think we’d hear it.”

“Not if they’re really bad at it.”

“Just open the door.”

Patrick turned the handle. The door fell open with a low creak. A rectangle of light fell into the cabin, illuminating the small space. It was empty. “Huh.”

They peeked in on every cabin in the row, but they were all empty. Even the fire that perpetually burned in Dylan’s room, the one he even left burning when they left the fort, had gone out. “What’s going on here?” Ben asked anxiously.

“I have no idea.”

They crossed the yard, searching all the buildings along the way, but there was no sign of anyone. The gardening tools were stowed in the shed, the vegetable baskets were empty and stacked in the corner, and the clean laundry from the day before had been pulled off the line.

Patrick stood in the center of the grounds with his arms folded across his chest. He glanced sharply around the area while Ben paced anxiously along the wall, looking for any sign of...well, anything. “Look at this,” Patrick said, sweeping his hand around the yard. “Does this strike you as odd?”

“The fact that no one’s here? Yeah it does.”

“No. The fact that everything is so...tidy.”

Ben stopped. He had a point there. Since when did garden tools get put away? When were the baskets ever stacked? When were there not a few pairs of pants perpetually clinging to the clothesline?

“You’re right,” Ben said. “Something’s wrong.”

“I think you mean something’s amiss,” Patrick said, but there was no mirth in it. They hustled over to the front gate. It was closed, but unlocked. “Benny Boy,” he said, “I think we’ve been abandoned.”

Ben started. “Bullshit. We haven’t been abandoned. Why would we be abandoned?”

“I have no earthly idea,” Patrick admitted with a frown. “But look. The gate only locks from the inside. And it’s
never
left unlocked. So the only reason to leave it unlocked is if there’s no one left to lock it from inside. Get it?”

Ben shook his head. “So what? They all went for a walk. They went to go take pot shots at the Carsons. They went to do whatever, but they’re coming back.”

Patrick rubbed his hands down his face and signed. “I don’t think so.”

“What do you mean you don’t think so?” Ben asked, his voice tinged with panic. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not just that they’re gone. It’s that
everything
is gone.” He walked back to the row of cabins, Ben following close on his heels. They burst into James’ cabin. Patrick made a sweeping gesture around the room. “Look. It’s all gone.”

It was true. James’ floor, usually littered with clothes and books, was completely bare. The water bottles he kept in the corner were gone. Even the blanket from his bunk was missing.

“No,” whispered Ben, his eyes growing wide. He dashed out of the room and ran to the next bunk, Annie’s. He shouldered his way past the door and came to a screeching halt in the center of the room. It was completely bare. The same was true of Sarah’s room, and Dylan’s, and Amsalu’s. Nothing of any of them remained.

“Someone kidnapped them,” he decided, storming back out into the yard. “Those fucking Carsons. We have to go find them.” But Patrick merely stood by and tapped his lips with one finger.

“That doesn’t make sense. ‘Hey, we’re kidnapping you, but only you five, not the other two, and hurry up, we’ll let you pack your things.’ No way. There’s no sign of struggle, not even any sign of rush. It’s like they planned to go.”

“They didn’t abandon us!” Ben yelled hoarsely.

Patrick sighed. “I think maybe they did, Ben.” He patted Ben on the shoulder. “But come on, we’ll take a quick look around town.”

Ben started off toward the gate, but Patrick turned and headed back to their cabin. “Where are you going?”

“To change clothes,” Patrick said. “I’m not going adventuring in pajama pants. There’s such a thing as dignity.” The only problem was, he didn’t know exactly where to find his jeans. They’d been on the clotheslines with the rest of the laundry. But he had a hunch.

He went inside their cabin and looked around. Sure enough, the jeans were folded neatly on the floor near the door. Someone had delivered a full laundry service in the night while they slept. He sighed and picked up the jeans. When he did, a yellow piece of paper fell out of the folds and onto the ground.

Patrick stared quizzically down at the note.
Where did that come from
? And why did it look so familiar?

He picked it up off the floor. It was old, weathered, practically falling apart. He opened it gingerly, careful not to rip it along the folds. He smoothed the paper on the bunk and read the words written there.

“Holy shit,” he breathed.

Ben poked his head into the room. “You ready or what?” Patrick shook his head and beckoned Ben inside. He held out the paper. Ben frowned down at him.

“What’s that?”

“Read it,” Patrick said quietly.

Ben took the note and skimmed it. Then he read it again, more carefully. Then he read it a third time. Then he read it again.

“What is this?” he said, brow furrowed. “Who wrote this?” And then again, “What is this?”

Patrick sighed and took the note back. He folded it carefully. “It’s the reason for this trip,” he said, his eyes glazed over with tears. Then, quietly, to himself, he said, “How could I forget about this?”

Ben narrowed his eyes. “
That’s
why we’re going to Florida?” Patrick nodded solemnly. Ben scoffed. “Well, shit, Pat, why didn’t you just tell me that?”

Patrick shrugged. It suddenly seemed to be a great effort for his thin, shaking shoulders. “I don’t know. I thought you’d think it was--” He trailed off. “I don’t know.”

“It’s a hell of a lot better than, ‘Because I’ve never been,’” Ben muttered. “But, Pat, how did you forget something like that? I mean, how
could
you?”

Patrick just shook his head. “I don’t know,” he whispered, his eyes glazed over with tears. “I don’t--” But then the oracle’s words returned to him, echoing through his cobwebbed brain. And suddenly, he knew how. “Sirens,” he breathed.

“What?”

“Sirens. This place, these people. The unlimited number of engineering projects for me, the pretty, enigmatic girl for you, food and shelter and good company. Ben, they’re nothing but sirens. Luring us onto the rocks, making us forget.”

Ben bit his bottom lip and kicked the doorjamb so hard the whole cabin shook. “That’s bullshit,” he said, but they both felt the resignation in his voice.

Patrick sighed. “Ben. We have to go.”

It didn’t take them long to pack. Their liquor stores had been all but depleted, so even with the addition of a spade and a trowel that Patrick pilfered from the shed (“Because you never know when you’ll have a digging emergency”), their load was considerably lighter. Patrick spent a good ten minutes scouring the cabin for the pudding cup. He knew he hadn’t eaten it, but he couldn’t speak for the rest of the group. Like the note, he’d forgotten all about the Snack Pack, and the more he searched for it, the more frantic he became. He tossed their sheets, dumped out their bags, shook out their clothes, becoming more and more panicked, his heart hammering in his chest, a sudden sheen of sweat covering his face. He gripped his bunk and hauled it away from the wall in a burst of desperation, and there, on the floor, still unopened, sat the little cup of butterscotch pudding. “Must’ve hidden it from myself,” he said, exhaling his relief. “Thank you, instincts.”

He went out to pull some vegetables from the garden while Ben did a final inspection of the cabins, searching for some sign,
any
sign, that the rest of the group had found it hard to leave. But there was nothing.

Their new family was completely and utterly gone.

“How could they do that?” he asked angrily, joining Patrick outside in the yard. “How could they just...leave?”

Patrick shook his head. “I don’t know. But they obviously didn’t want to be here when we woke up.” He placed his hands on Ben’s shoulders and looked him squarely in the eyes. “Listen to me. When we’re done with Disney World, we’ll come back. If they’re not here, we’ll go looking for them. We’ll spend the rest of our lives looking, if that’s what it takes. That’ll be our new quest,” he promised. “So speaketh the apocalypticon.”

•

They watched in silence from the roof of the building across from the fort as the two men passed through the gate and turned down toward the bay.

“Guess they found the note,” Sarah said quietly, her arms crossed tightly at her chest. Her cold, dull eyes followed them as he ambled down the street, looking back over his shoulder every few steps, looking, she knew, for her.

“It was the right thing to do,” James said. He placed his hand on her shoulder and squeezed, but she shrugged him off.

“Some great friend you turned out to be,” Annie told her brother, rolling her eyes.

James frowned. “It’s tough love,” he said. Then he added, quietly, “Tough for all of us.”

“Do not worry,” said Amsalu, closing his eyes lifting his face to the mid-morning light. “We will see them again if it is God’s will.”

Dylan snorted and flicked his spent joint off the roof. “The city of God has a vacancy sign,” he said. “Elvis has left the building.”

20.

“Rock, paper, scissors!” Patrick threw rock. Ben bounced an extra time, then threw scissors.

“Dammit, Pat!” he cried in frustration. “You said one, two, three,
then
shoot!”

“That was seconds ago, Ben. Literally
seconds
. I can’t be expected to remember paltry details for entire seconds. Besides, that gave you the upper hand, you could see what I threw, and you still lost! That means I double win, and we take to the sea. And may God have mercy on your pitiful hand-eye coordination.” He headed down the street toward the sound of the Gulf, whistling a merry tune.

“I want to be on record that this is the latest in your string of really stupid trip decisions,” Ben grumbled, shuffling down the street after him. He cast a few hopeful glances back over his shoulder, but the streets behind them were empty. “Glad to see we’re picking right up where we left off.”

“This is not a stupid idea,” Patrick insisted. “Some of those earlier ideas, yes, those were stupid ideas. But
this
idea? This idea is an
excellent
idea! I feel the Gulf wind calling us. We will sail ourselves to Florida!”

“Do you know even anything about sailing?” Ben asked sourly, his cheeks flushing red. Patrick got the sense that maybe he was not on board with this exciting new plan.

“Ben, I get the sense that maybe you’re not on board with this exciting new plan,” he said. “But I don’t want you to worry. What’s to know? You get a boat, you raise the sail, and you wait for a giant cloud with a face to float down and blow some wind. I’ve seen cartoons before, I know how this works. Or are you forgetting Rule Number 26?”
When in doubt, defer to entertainment media.

“That is a stupid rule,” Ben declared.

“You came up with it!”

“Because you didn’t want me to have a dog!”

“That stupid
I Am Legend
dog didn’t exactly save Robert from blowing himself apart with a grenade, now, did he?”

“But he made life bearable!” Ben insisted.

“And your dog pissed on your head when you slept.”

“He had a nervous condition.”

“He probably got a whole lot more nervous when you threw him out into the Chicago wasteland.”

“What, you think I’m gonna sit there and get peed on every night? No, thank you. Who am I, Charlie Sheen?”

This continued into a fierce argument that made Patrick extremely regretful that he’d ever agreed to dispel the First Rule of the Road. He briefly considered invoking Martial Law, but then he remembered that Ben was approximately all the way stronger than him. And, besides, the argument was healthy. It was getting Ben’s mind off what they were leaving behind.

“You’ll love sailing,” Patrick promised as he sauntered down toward the bay. “Fresh air, cool breeze, minimal Monkey fog, calm waters. This will be great and in no way dangerous or life threatening. I promise.”

Before long, they reached the water’s edge. A little ways down the coast, a handful of empty docks jutted into the Gulf. The only boats in sight were ones that had smashed against the rocks or had run aground on the beach. They were either half sunken in water or splintered on the shore. Any boat retaining its ability to float had long since pushed off from the wharf.

“Okay, Popeye, now what?” Ben asked. “We can’t sail without a boat.”

Patrick turned and searched the edge of the city. An old, rusty sign declared a particularly skeezy looking building to be the Two Hearts Motel. A broad smile spread across his face. “Benny Boy,” he declared proudly, “I have a plan.”

•

“You have got to be kidding.”

“I never kid about romance,” Patrick said.

“There is nothing romantic about this.” Ben tried to imagine what the room might have looked like three years ago, before the apocalypse. He gave the motel as many benefits of the doubt as he could mentally muster, but even so, the place had been slimy. He pictured the brown shag carpet, luxurious and new, unsoiled by the mysterious stains that he knew were probably there long before the end of the world. The circular bed had either spun or vibrated (possibly both) when whatever Deep South Don Juan inhabited the room for the night (or, more likely, for the hour) dropped a quarter in a now defunct box on the wall. A dramatic trident-shaped candlestick of tarnished brass held the uneven stubs of three mostly melted candles that had once glowed dimly against the soft pink walls. The ceiling had once been fully mirrored, though now it looked like a reflective checkerboard. A few of the mirror panels lay shattered on the soiled carpet, the lazy brown webs painted on the surface almost a perfect match for the dusty shag. The silk bed sheets were still in reasonably good shape, though in his mind, Ben preferred to picture them without the large ovals of sticky residue that signified that this room had been inhabited at the time of the Jamaican attack. The lovers’ clothes were still splayed across the floor, in various stages of decomposition.

But the thing that held Patrick’s attention wasn’t in the main sleeping area. It was in the oversized bathroom. In fact, it practically
was
the oversized bathroom. “It” was a large, heart-shaped Jacuzzi bathtub, set loosely into a wood paneled dais. It was filthy, covered in dust, dirt, years-old soap scum, and a thin layer of Monkey dust, but the fiberglass appeared to be sturdy and unbroken.

“It
used
to be romantic. In simpler times. And, if you play your cards right,” he said, placing a hand gently on Ben’s arm, “it might be again.”

“Get off me,” Ben demanded, squirming out of reach. “What the hell are we supposed to do with this thing?”

“This ‘thing,’ as you so disdainfully call it, is our ticket to the seven seas!” Patrick rubbed his hands together excitedly.

“It’s a bath tub.”

“It’s a Jacuzzi,” Patrick corrected him. “Which means this outer piece is our fiberglass hull. Grab that end.” He pointed to the tub’s left ventricle. Ben sighed and approached it reluctantly. The lip of the tub had conveniently come away from the wooden support. He wedged his fingers in the crack and tried not to think of the fact that they could be across the Florida state line by now if they’d headed out north from Fort Doom on foot. “All right,” Patrick said, grabbing the pointy tip of the heart. “Now, pull!” They both heaved against the dirty red fiberglass. The tub creaked and moaned against its moorings, but age and neglect had weakened the wooden base, and a series of pops indicated success. They groaned with effort as they pried the tub up away from the base. Ben pulled the edge of the tub up one foot, two feet, three feet, until he could comfortably grab the plexiglass with both hands. He wrenched his arms up, deadlift style, and the giant heart broke completely free of its bonds.

“You are so handy,” Patrick panted, setting his end back down. “Now. We just need to haul this thing out of here, find a way to seal the jet holes, and we’ve got ourselves a boat.”

It took about twenty more minutes to lug the tub out of the bathroom and through the motel room door. Both doorways were just slightly too narrow for the tub to go through on its side, so the men kicked away the cheap wooden trim and rammed the sturdy tub through the naked doorways. Streaks of broken drywall dust lined both sides of the Jacuzzi as they rolled it to a crashing halt outside the motel.

Ben stopped a minute to catch his breath. Patrick had a few good qualities, but physical strength was not among them. Ben had been doing almost all of the heavy lifting. “How’d you know there’d be a heart tub in here?” he wheezed. “Please tell me you’ve stayed here before.”

“No. But if B horror movies have taught me anything, it’s that shady love motels are guaranteed to have Jacuzzis. The heart shape is an unexpected and pleasant surprise.”

“It’s something, all right,” Ben murmured.

“It’s naturally aerodynamic,” Patrick explained. “This baby’ll cut through the water like a knife.” He went back into the room and retrieved the stubs of candle wax from the holder by the bed. He searched through three rooms before digging up a half empty book of matches with
Two Hearts Motel
stamped in gold on the cover. He lit one of the candles and used it to melt the other two, dripping the wax over the jet holes on both sides of the tub.

“Will that hold?” Ben asked, a familiar cloud of dread settling over his brain.

“No clue,” Patrick admitted. “But we’re about to find out.” He pointed up at the sky. Ben turned to find a solid wall of thick, black clouds. Almost instantly, lightning cracked against the horizon, and huge pellets of rain began slamming down from above. “Quick!” Patrick cried, lifting the side of the tub. “Everybody under!”

Ben wondered why his default response was always obedience. What he really wanted to do was run back inside the motel room and wait out the storm, but instead he ducked under the tub, and Patrick lowered it down over them.

“Ah! So cozy!” Patrick declared, snuggling up to the grimy sides of the overturned heart. Ben, on the other hand, tried to stay as centered in his ventricle as possible. The smell of the dust and filth made his stomach flop.

Rain deluged the tub. The pounding was deafening. What dim light there was outside filtered through the red fiberglass, casting a grayish-pink glow inside the little red shelter. Ben could see streams of rain running down the outside of the tub, and some little rivulets of water pushed their way under the lip of the Jacuzzi between the fiberglass and the asphalt. But the wax seals held tight, and not a single drop of water seeped in through the closed jet holes. After about fifteen minutes the storm passed, and Patrick flipped the boat over excitedly. “She’ll hold!” he cried, literally jumping up and down.

They sloshed their way through the puddles back down to the water’s edge, holding the heart boat up over their heads. When they reached the ocean, they heaved the boat down onto the beach and dug it securely into the rocky sand. “Now we need a sail,” Patrick said.

After a little scrounging, their best hope was a long vinyl banner, about 15 feet in length and three feet wide. There were words written on one side of the banner, albeit in a language that neither of them recognized. JEBALEM TWOJA MATKA was stamped into the dirty white vinyl in blue letters big enough to read from 100 yards away. “What do you think it says?” Ben asked.

“I believe it says, ‘Safe passage.’ I feel that in my heart.”

As they scavenged for a mast and rope, a few native Mobilians began to stir. They were all silent, haunted folks, most of them gaunt and hungry. Ben eyed them all suspiciously. Most of the locals they’d run into over the last couple of months had been peaceful enough, just as wary of the Fort Doomers as the Fort Doomers were of them. But there were just enough malicious assholes out there to keep a man on his toes. Every time someone came within 50 feet of their boat, Ben pulled out the spade and made violent stabs in their direction. It seemed to get the point across fairly well.

Patrick took a different tact with the quiet natives. After Ben chased them away, he waved happily after them, calling, “
Jabalem twoja matkai
!” This garnered him more than a few strange looks, and even the occasional glare. But before long he’d been able to rig up a mast out of driftwood and a set of discarded bungee cords, and by the time the sun sank over the horizon, they had a homemade sailboat.

They stood back and admired it in the green-tinged sunset. It looked like a kindergartener’s art project, set to scale.

“This’ll go badly,” Ben said, knowing with absolute certainty that it was the truth.

“This’ll be
exciting
,” Patrick countered. And Ben had to admit that this, also, was true.

•

They took turns guarding the boat that night, and at first light, they pushed it groggily into the Gulf. “Oh good Christ, that is cold!” Patrick screamed as he stumbled clumsily into the water. “It’s like ice daggers in my leg souls!”

“Your legs are soulless, just like the rest of you.” Ben hopped into the boat from the dry beach and fell into it with a
thump
. The boat rocked back and forth, splashing water up higher on Patrick’s legs. He howled curses at the sky.

“You’re a motherless scant of a whore pup!” he cried, hopping out of the water and back onto the beach.

“Grab the shovel on your way back in, will you? We’re going to need that.”

Patrick swiped the spade off the sand and lobbed it at the boat. Ben yelped and ducked. The blade missed his head by six inches and splashed into the ocean. Ben reached over and drew it in. “You coming, or what?” he asked, using the spade to row away from the shore.

Patrick grumbled under his breath. The boat was floating farther and farther away. “I hate you, Ben Fogelvee,” he called out over the lapping waves. Ben smiled and waved back at him. Patrick took a deep breath, steeled his innards, and rushed like a madman into the frigid surf.

After Patrick had pulled himself into the boat and shaken off as much water as he could, the pair found the ship to be a bit of a tight squeeze. Between the mast, their backpacks, the spade, the hammer, the baton, the machete, the wrench, the trowel, and the two mariners, there wasn’t much space to loll around. But as close as it was, the boat floated marvelously, and they were both soon in high spirits. “See? Isn’t this nice?” Patrick asked as he paddled.