PostApoc (13 page)

Carrie moans, arches her back. Brandy looks at me again.

“She just collapsed and when she woke up she couldn't talk,” she says.

Carrie's nose starts to bleed. We all just stand there and stare. She moans again, looks close to tears. I go upstairs and lie down, plug my ears as another wave of Carrie's pain surges through the house.

I fall asleep and dream of a couple. The girl is small but dominant. Decisive. She wears blue eyeliner and has a beauty mark on her lower right cheek. She would have been popular in high school.

The man is tall, built. A little bit older than us. Also dominant, but not towards her. They have chosen me as their third and their surrogate. I will carry their child, and the child will be a wolf.

It's not the man who has sex with me. He just watches, makes sure we're doing it right.

The girl is a shapeshifter. Her animal self is a male dog, half wolf. They expect that I will shapeshift, too. They know something about me that I don't, and even though I trust their conviction I doubt that I will be able to change.

The girl mounts me as a human, in the missionary position. As she pumps into me her body starts to change.
The in-between of her face is a horror movie vampire, half transformed into its creature state. Her forehead is ridged and her shoulders are bulked.

She pushes her fingers hard into my collarbone. It hurts so much I expect something to break.

“You should be changing by now,” she says. “This might help your shoulders come forward.”

I know that whether I change or not, the story will end in the same way: I will become pregnant and birth a wolf. I will love it, but it will never be mine.

I wake up. The sun's completely gone down now. Aimee must have come in after I fell asleep because she's in bed beside me, breathing evenly. Downstairs, Carrie is still gasping, whimpering. I can hear her through the floor.

In the candlelight of the living room Carrie is blue-white, eyes wide, protruding. Brandy wipes foam from her friend's mouth. Trevor holds a cloth to Carrie's forehead as her hips buck up off the mattress. Her body slumps beneath his touch and a puff of unsettled dust rises from below her.

Carrie pulls at her pants, says it's too hot to keep them on. Cam is in the corner, keeping his distance. He doesn't make a move to help so I get down at Carrie's ankles and pull.

There's blood between her legs, leaking through the crotch of her panties. It starts as a slow pool before whooshing out, intestines, liver, kidneys, a stew of worms slick along the inside of Carrie's thighs. Brandy draws a sharp breath and puts a hand to her friend's forehead, intended to comfort. Below her touch, something bulges at Carrie's temples. Her scalp sheds its hair and, newly bald, shines with swelter.

Carrie's eyes shut, seal. Her temples stretch to breaking—on the sides of her head emerge new eyes, bulging and wide. She screams and her voice crescendos from woman to baby. Her hand comes up, reaching, but her fingers are stumps, fist a nub, arm shrinking up into the shoulder socket.

“Oh my God,” Brandy says, “her legs. Look at her legs.” In seconds they've been sucked up, too, until Carrie's nothing but the block of a body, a deep purple torso and head, no neck, no body cavities. Her cry weakens over a stopping heart as my body does something that feels like fainting.

When I open my eyes again, I am in bed. The sun's burning low and orange in the sky, right beside an amber moon the colour of a cat's eye. I am the only one still in bed. I must have been asleep for hours. Or unconscious. I didn't even hear anyone get up.

I listen for the drop or scrape of something heavy on the floor: a boot or an empty bottle. I listen for a voice, a shout, but I get nothing back.

I get up and reach for a cigarette. Down to my last two. I wonder if Aimee and Tara are getting low on theirs. It'll be a good excuse to get out of here.

Maybe I should just not come back. This house, it's not good for any of us.

Aimee and Tara are in the bathroom, sitting on the edge of the dry bathtub. Tara's got her arms wrapped around herself like she's trying to keep warm. I can count every bone in her body from here.

Aimee's rushing a smoke to her mouth, taking two drags at a time like she can't get enough in. They're so focused on themselves that it takes a few seconds before they notice I'm here.

“You know what happened last night,” Aimee says. Her left knee bounces. Every jolt knocks away the ash off the end of her cigarette.

“Yeah.” I take a final drag off my own and put it out in the sink. Aimee offers her cigarette to me. The filter is wet with her spit.

“The body's gone, you know,” Tara says. “Don't know where they went with it, but they didn't want it around. Cam's worried it might contaminate the house.” There's the usual gravel in Tara's voice but it's got a childish tone mixed in today, nerves tightening all the way through to the vocal chords.

“They all left a couple hours ago,” Aimee says.

“Are they coming back?” I ask.

“They said they weren't sure,” Tara says.

- 20 -
BLINK

B
link and an hour passes. There's a glass of vodka, filled to the top, at my lips. I swallow and the liquid sticks in my throat like a tentative syllable, strong enough to bring the whole building down. Blink and I'm a blank slate of recall, lips slightly bruised. A taste of new territory in the mouth.

This sense of travel, this transcendence of time-space-moments, is what Tooth would say is the result of disrupting the universe. I told him I'm not really supposed to be alive right now and he said, “That makes more sense than anything I've ever heard.”

I am one of a handful of people still at the Mission. Shit Kitten played a set but I only know it happened because Aimee keeps telling me it's already done. Blink and you'll miss everything.

Four out of ten people are staring right at me. Total mess. I lose my balance and fall forward, knock an empty bottle into someone's lap on the other side of the booth. I apologize but the two girls across from me pretend I'm not there.

Get outside and the sun is still out. Streets empty, except for Tooth, sitting on the corner, smoke in hand.

“Hey,” he says. I hang onto the telephone pole on my way over to him.

“So that's it?” I ask. “Is it all over?”

“I'm thinking of going to Montreal,” he says. “We all are. We heard things aren't as bad there yet. Heard there are places we could stay, people who can help us out.”

The road is radiating heat. It smells like unwashed hair. I find a cigarette on the ground, barely smoked. Pick it up and light it.

“You better say goodbye to me before you go,” I say.

“Don't worry,” Tooth says. “I'll let you know.”

Cam and Trevor have come back to the house but Brandy is gone. We don't ask where she went, but assume we won't see her again. Maybe she's walking home like she always wanted to.

With fewer people around there are fewer sounds to cover up the hauntings. Today the ghost upstairs is active, but I am the only one listening and she knows it. She likes to be asked questions but says she's sad that no one ever wants to ask her anything. Little girl ghost. Ask her what she feels and she'll tell you about the cold between her legs, how it twists and licks around the tops of her thighs, its tongue a trunk of steel, simultaneous mix of tease and dread.

Ask her about the noise, all day, all night sometimes. She knows we don't like to listen to her. She says she listens to us talking and moving and waits for a break in everything so she can move and talk, too.

Ask her what she's built like and she'll say, “Claws in my toes, long black beaks and moons in my fingernails. Bird species underside.”

Listen and she'll say, “This is how I play.” And then scratch—SCRRRAAATCH—as urgent as a dog at a screen door. Her voice is a whisper-growl, a half-squeal that's caught in the black tar drips down the back of an old throat.

Ask her how she died and she'll say she doesn't remember.

I can't sleep right now, so I think of it for her. I wait for a transformation to hit me. Count to sixty but get nothing. My buzz—a mix of hard liquor and whatever anyone would give me last night—is finally starting to wear off. I should be passed out. I must have eaten some speed at one point.

A hangover hits me at the same rate of my declining euphoria. I'm suddenly at the bathroom sink, dry-heaving until my nausea's disrupted by something grabbing at my feet.

My body believes there is only a sliver of reality here. I wonder how much of it shows, and if I am beginning to forget what connected my brain to these bones before I was ever able to come together at all.

Back in bed I try to remember why I am still here. A shadow thought pulls at a memory that feels like regret but scrambles to get the thread between its teeth. My head spins but I still can't sleep so I think of Hunter: black leather and the ocean and a calloused fingertip rubbing my softest skin. I think of incongruent meetings and the rhythm of our pushing and pulling. I think of how I knew he would always be in my head, but never imagined there'd be a day when he was nowhere else.

I'm interrupted by choking sounds. Gagging. The distortion of Tara's voice box. She's in her own withdrawal and it's too much for my ears. I've heard enough, can't take in any more resonance.

“Can you hear them?” The little girl ghost is still above me, reaching out, but I bet she feels nothing. When she gets inside me she'll know I'm empty, the dead's equivalent of avoiding eye contact.

I can tell that today is one of those days where no moment will ease into the next. It will all just slam together. I know this because Aimee and I go from being in bed to being out the door, doing a run for Tara. We left her sick on the floor, begging.

Okay, so we aren't just going for Tara. We're going for ourselves, too. But when someone's kicking worse than you it's easy to disguise your habits as charity.

Three blocks away we see a small group of people.

“I wonder who that is?” Aimee asks, as though we should know everyone.

There are four guys and a girl. The girl raises her hands, bends deep and cartwheels into the road. Her body curves as her legs flip. She lands on her ass.

She pulls herself together, positions her hands to push off the asphalt. None of the guys with her offer to help. She's about to stand and then stops, feeling something beneath a pile of debris on the road. Out comes a shard of foggy glass, as long and crooked as a wizard's finger.

“Look what I found!” she yells, legs taking off as she leaps up, runs towards the next block and vaults a newspaper box. There's still a newspaper inside.

“Let's grab that,” Aimee says. “We can use it for a fire.”

We're coming up just behind the group now. The girl stabs the air, spins and kicks at an imaginary opponent before she sees us riding up.

“You wanna have a sword fight?” she asks, stabbing the air between her and us. We just laugh, shake our heads no, even though I wish we could.

“No,” she says, her voice lower now. “No, I know what you want, though. I can read it on you. You're looking for grayline,” she says, pointing a scabbed finger at us.

“Lucky guess,” Aimee says.

“You know who has the best?” the girl asks.

We follow her directions to a house not far up the road. We knock on the door and ask for Chris. He answers wearing only boxer shorts stiff at the front with sticky-dry stains.

He looks from me to Aimee, Aimee to me, me to Aimee again. “Hmm,” he says, “which one will I choose first?” His eyes dart over each of us one more time and then he smiles and points to Aimee. “You,” he says. “You come with me.”

Fair enough. I know what I look like: stringy hair so greasy it's gone from white-blonde to sandy beige. Cheeks sunken, accenting my skull. I stopped wearing a bra because there's nothing for it to hold anymore. Everything has fallen away from me, like it always has.

I sit in the hallway outside Chris' bedroom, where he told me to wait. He hasn't shut the door all the way and I can hear him in there:

“The other week, I stopped outside a store I used to go to all the time. The front windows had been smashed out, or maybe they just fell apart. I wanted to look inside but knew there was nothing left. A few feet away there was a body in the road. I'd never seen a dead body before. I haven't seen many around, surprisingly. Have you?
Anyway, there were animals around it, eating. I didn't want to go near it but I couldn't stop myself, either, so I went over and it was the body of a little kid. The skin was green and grey. It was hard to tell if it had been a boy or a girl, but from the clothes I'd say it was a boy. There were dogs and a cat and a raccoon all in there, eating at the neck and belly, all the soft spaces. The animals didn't even run when they saw me. It's like they know they have all the power now.

“Anyway,” he says, “I'm so glad you're here because I can't stop thinking about it. I really had to tell someone and you're that person. Just you, just now.”

When you talk about something, you're letting it go. Keep it in and it seals itself inside of you. The longer it's in there, the deeper it gets. But what happens to the person you tell it to? Does it move on to go live with them? Will Chris' stories live with us after we leave here?

I already want to go and I've just gotten into bed with him. He's different from Mike. Aggressive. His leg is over top of mine, applying too much pressure. Like he's trying to keep me in place.

He's pressing up hard against my butt and I can feel it's making him grow. He asks me to tell him something. I don't want to but I don't want to have to lie here for longer than I need to, either. Might as well as just do what he wants.

“I feel like I have to—”

I don't get the rest of my sentence out before his hand cups a nub that used to be of one of my breasts. He massages it with a massive, heavy grip, and talks:

“How did I think I would even live through this?” he asks. “There are stories. I've heard them from other people who've come here to pick up. One girl told me she was running out of her neighbourhood the night of the big fires when a woman's body dropped right beside her. At first she thought the woman had a heart attack or something but no, she'd been hit on the head with a rock. There was a guy standing right there with the rock still in his hand, ready to bring it down again.

“But you know what the girl remembers about that? Not what the guy looked like, or if anyone stopped to do anything. No, she remembers that there was still fat in this woman's face and around her middle. It would have been gone in another week or two had she lived, of course.”

None of us expected to have to know what to do for this long, on our own. We never knew we'd have to pick through other people's stories while they picked at us, just so that we could pick up.

I try to convince myself that this is easier than I expected, staying here beside Chris. The promise that the day holds is that I'll soon be wrapping myself around the floor, and that's enough to get me through this. I will get through this.

We don't make it out of Chris's house. At least not right away. When you can swallow things that'll take away whatever heaviness you have left you bring weakness to all you want to forget. You realize this when you're high but when you're sober you can't get that feeling back.
You remember having it, and you remember the knowledge it gave, but you can't remember how to access it under your own will.

Open hands. That's what I wake up to, after falling asleep beside Chris. Mistake Number One right there. He runs his hands, spread flat and wide, over my ass, my stomach. He glides over my bellybutton and I flutter inside.
I could come right now
, I think, surprised that my body is still capable of reacting this way.

I scream at myself but keep it all in my head. Disgusted by what my hips are begging for, disgusted by Chris's touch. Another second and I might have screamed outside of myself, but voices barge through the front door.

Chris jumps out of bed. “You and your friend can stick around if you want.”

If you can start drinking and drugging as soon as you're awake, split a dusty bottle of sour wine with some girl you've just met, you can trick yourself into thinking things aren't so bad. Get enough of a buzz and the house you're in, no matter how much its walls creep on you, can start to feel okay, like you can at least relax here. The dirt—and we're talking about a different kind of dirt than the usual film that covers everyone's skin now—starts to dissipate, drift away. You can lie to yourself that you're cleaner now than when you started. You can ignore what you know: that later tonight, or tomorrow, you'll have never wished for a shower so badly before.

I get into a chugging contest with some girl named Sarah. Says she knows Chris but doesn't say they're friends. The wine that came with her and two other guys was lifted from some basement of a house they broke into along the way.

I win the competition but it's Sarah who's stumbling around the room now, telling everyone, “You're fucked out of your mind!”

The guys are laughing but me and Aimee just look at each other. I want to leave, but before I get the words out to say so a guy with long brown hair and a beard to match walks over with an open hand and says, “This will help you girls.” It's more grayline. We pop the pills in our mouths and this guy sits down, talks. His mouth moves but his lips are shooting blanks.

Aimee shakes his hand, makes a deal I'm deaf to. He holds his hand out to me and I take it but can't even say my name because my face is a seizure of light and shade, flicking on and off, a rhythm I can't catch up to.

The sun's grim in the window and everyone's hiding from it in the shadows until Chris pulls the curtains shut.
The fluorescent flicker hits the whole room and that's when I know I'm really tripping because there is no electricity today.

Sarah stops and starts, goes from dancing to talking in thirty-second intervals, her movements disjointed by the in-out-in of bright to black.