PostApoc (17 page)

You've kept your finger on your pulse your whole life and been disappointed every time. Although you can live several weeks without food you need an adequate amount under severe discretions. Lack of willpower means better retention of essential vitamins, minerals and salts. An inadequate caloric intake could lead to cannibalism in the wild but the only wilderness to contend with is the exotic hallucination of a bare ocean and an imbalance of bird bone and hard, canine surfaces.

Strike the earth. Properly exorcise any stones used in multiple rituals. Estimate fluid loss by measuring heart and breathing rates.

A wrist pulse rate at a hundred beats per minute means a breathing rate of twelve to twenty breaths per minute and should be approached with affection. This is not yet death, only lucid dreaming.

A wrist pulse rate at a hundred to a hundred and twenty beats per minute means a breathing rate of twenty to thirty breaths per minute and should be approached with care. This is not yet death, only a tool and technique to tap into the spirit world.

A wrist pulse rate at a hundred and twenty to a hundred and forty beats per minute and thirty to forty breaths per minute indicates vital signs should be approached with awe. This is the moment we've all been waiting for.

For now, breathe. The pop of life under your skin has tenacity.

Dogs have pushed the raccoons out and are now circling below. I consider jumping from this roof to the next but don't trust my spatial judgment, or the strength of my legs. It looks like it's only two, maybe three feet, but I can see myself missing by a step, hands clawing down the brown brick.

Something round and hard bounces off my head. From the sky, a clattering of brown hail. I get hit again, step back, and something crunches under me. It's not hail falling from the sky, but snails. The sky must be eating its own tail and is squeezing out whatever's getting sucked up in its coils.

I crouch under a hooded air vent, snails crunching under me with every step. The clouds above turn an oily grey, a colour I've never seen come over them before.

I don't know how long I've been awake today but fatigue is coming on. My thoughts are spinning out and I'm mumbling, “Our skulls will be replicated in a painting on a telephone pole. If the collapse of everything isn't coming right at this moment, then it will be any day now. We just have to be ready, find a way to focus on—what? A belief you would like to touch. A reach that gets beyond a spiritual void, even though that gap is the size of a cavern.

“Find a way to focus on an extra coating, a haze poised to be devoured.”

If I could wish for anything right now it would be for this to stop. So I can get off this roof and back to Aimee.

I might have just wished the last wish on earth because the clattering breaks off. Around me are thousands of snails. I stretch out my strides to kill as few as possible but the crunch under my weight is still disquieting, leaving an oozing trail.

The raccoons aren't circling anymore. They must have taken cover from the falling shells. I clear the ladder two rungs at a time and get on my bike, head back to the house.

- 24 -
BEFORE EVERYTHING BREAKS APART

S
omething's crawled into the Victorian. Cam's blaming Tara, says she brought it home with her while he was out with Taser, but Tara says it found its way through the front door on its own.

It's in the living room now, making the continuous sound of a small world folding in on itself. Its body consists of two girls in one, arms and legs the impossible thinness of a praying mantis. Identical in their plain faces and stringy hair, their sunken eyes, they stare at us from violet irises but remain mute. Instead of mouths they have slashes. Their double body fits into one chair, limbs a puzzle of sticks clasping in place.

We all stand in the living room doorway, watching, afraid to move, afraid to turn our backs. Tara's the only one not with us.

“She's upstairs,” Aimee says. “Doing what, I don't know.”

Not even Taser, who snaps at everyone but Cam, will come into the house. “So much for a guard dog,” Aimee says, earning a “fuck you” from Cam.

Below us, a leaden scrape across the basement floor. A dead man's incoherent shouts follow a few seconds later. Even the spirits are disturbed by what's in here now.

Upstairs, Tara's found an old tube of lipstick under a mattress and tried it on. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and crimson red smears down the side of her face. She looks at me and says, “Where'd you get to for so long?” The question comes through the lipstick slit, as if she's just made a new mouth in her cheek.

I don't answer, just stare back her, speechless in the reflection of her eyes' infected abyss.

Cam and Trevor move their stuff into our bedroom. We lock the door behind us to keep out whatever's still in the living room downstairs.

It's so hot that everyone takes off their shirts. The window's wide open and the air's got the same humid electricity as a summer storm, but it's swamp-still. Not even a breeze is getting in.

Energy ripples through the heat of the room. Cam offers up some grayline. I don't really want to do any but don't know what else to do to get through this.

Energy ripples through the heat of our words. Shamans, each of us. At least we'd like to think when we're high like this.

Now that we're all buzzing, Tara reconnects. Together, we go into a trance, and without her speaking I hear her tell us, “It occupies everything, this addiction. I never thought this would happen, or at least not so fast. I thought if any of us would get hooked it would be Ang, because she's already given herself up and away so much. Every day I think, ‘This must be right near the end.'”

Tara is at the door now, fumbling with the lock. It's stuck. “I need out right now,” she says.

Cam gets up, jiggles the handle, and Tara's out. We hear her run through the house and out the back door. We watch through the window as she braces herself against the porch railing. Taser bucks against his chain, barking wildly in Tara's direction.

A few weeks ago Tara thought she would never need a washroom again. Some people's bodies are either adapting or shutting down, everything turning to gristle inside. Now Tara's innards are turning to liquid, language projectile.

Aimee tells me to go help her and I get there in time to watch Tara choke in reverse on a ball of blue hair, same as her wig. She spits up a four-leaf clover, a crucifix, a cat with green gemstone eyes.

Her body, previously filled with black and bile and bone, has started to rebuild from the ash of grayline. The dead are coming to reclaim their bodies and are siphoning from Tara's, bleeding her nutrients, her bone density, her remaining muscle mass.

Tara spits out red laces that could fit a pair Doc Marten boots. The backs of her hands shed white-blonde hair, opposite to what grows from her head. In documented cases of possession, it's been noted that the possessed vomit objects: hair clips and bones and eyes. If grayline's ingredients include the ashes of the dead, are we voluntarily possessing their spirits?

Tara says she's just hallucinating. “It's like I'm having a vision of thinning blue jeans and an empty market stall and a flare of fraying denim over the tops of Converse high tops. The laces are undone and the feet inside are bare.
The person has a face but all I can see is a thick patch of pubic hair growing from the cream of pale cheeks, flecks of dirt matted into coarse brown clumps.”

Tara's words cut off just in time for her to heave out sagging cargo pockets of bad directions. Her tongue's as dry as a cat's.

“This might be right near the end, before everything breaks apart,” she says out loud this time.

Tara's body is uncontrollable, head rocking back with a dusting of laughter that starts out as a gag. Her bladder releases a gentle slide of dirt—cemetery earth. Tara recognizes the smell.

A dog barks. I can't tell if it's from Taser or from Tara. She coughs and it sounds like snapping white teeth clattering across the porch boards. Out comes more gravel and dust, followed by dark, shining things that live under rocks.

The tag on the back of Tara's t-shirt itches in a place she can't reach. I try to help but can't find the right spot. Her shoulder blades are like discs of wax, her hair a wick waiting to be lit on fire.

Tara grabs her middle as if hit with cramps. She squats and her colon sprays twigs. They fly off the porch and make spirals in the dirt, disrupt something black, a squirming body. The bug dislodges, runs disoriented towards Tara's calf. She tries to flick it away but misses. It burrows into the thickest part of her leg.

“This must be right near the end, before everything breaks apart,” Tara says again.

She moans and out comes rigor mortis and latent misgivings. A canopy of curls, disappearances, x-ray vision, blue eyeshadow. Closed eyes and quick jabs and something that goes harder, faster, harder, faster.

“This must be right near the end, before everything breaks apart,” she says once more.

It's my body and I'll die if I want to.

- 25 -
OBITUARY

W
e don't last long all locked in the same room together. Cam finds half a mickey we'd hid under a pillow and drinks it in three gulps. Ten minutes later he's all over Aimee, kneading her breasts.

“They look bigger than yesterday,” he says. “Did they grow overnight?”

Aimee pushes his hand away and moves over, wincing. She looks at me and says, “They're so sore today. I must be getting my period soon. I haven't had it in a while.”

Now that Cam's got a taste of alcohol in him he wants more. “Who's coming with me?”

“I'm going to sleep,” Aimee says, tired again. Tired all the time these days.

Tara's lying down already, too, an arm draped over her eyes. She doesn't answer.

“I'll go,” Trevor says.

“I'll go too,” I say.

Downstairs I hear the clink of bicycle chains and the click of Taser's nails on the driveway.
The two heads in the living room glare as I move towards the door, looking at me like I've got the taste of something they've always wanted. I finger the earring Tooth gave me.

Later, Aimee finds me on the porch.

“What's going on?” she asks.

“I just can't be inside right now,” I say. None of Cam's dealers were around when we'd gone out and the boys weren't ready to give up when I was.

Aimee's skin has turned the colour of ash. She says the girls with the praying mantis body crawled into the basement when she came downstairs. Aimee ran and locked the door behind them. Minutes afterward, the phantom shouts started rising up and haven't stopped. Something's banging on the door, begging to be let out, and we don't know if it's the girls or the ghost.

“A girl who's kept herself close to death long enough that it's left a smell—not of decay but of lilacs and roses just before they turn.” That's what I'd want someone to write in my obituary, if there were such things anymore.

I still have the first thing Hunter ever gave me, the only other thing of his I still have: a pressed flower in a compact mirror. I cup it in my hands now, afraid it will disintegrate if it falls out of my orbit. I call this unfortunate. A waste, my life.

When I first see Cam and Trevor running up to the house, it looks like they've caught an animal the way Trevor's cradling warm, red flesh. Taser isn't with them as they bang past us and fly through the front door.

But there's no fresh kill. Trevor's been bitten by Taser. Cam's got him on the living room with a dirty t-shirt wrapped around his hand. Cam is yelling, “Don't just stand there. Fucking HELP US.” Having drained the last of our booze earlier, he's washing Trevor's hand with rainwater.

I run upstairs for one of Aimee's pads and a bandana. One of Taser's teeth found a gap between the bones in Trevor's hand and went right through from bottom to top. Fate line severed.

Cam says everyone he knows is out of alcohol. It's the only thing we might be able to use to clean Trevor's hand and hasn't heard of anyone who's still got any. But Cam won't do the same things we'll do for booze, doesn't use the same dealers, even though he's aware of the options.

“I know someone,” I say.

Mike tells me he's been dreaming about women's underwear: light pink, lavender, charcoal cotton. He tells me he must be drying out inside because the other day he caught his wrist on a piece of glass but no blood came out. He pulls out a bottle of vodka and tells me, “This is the last one I can give you.”

We're sitting at the back of the house. The sun's setting. It's pretty but we don't say so. It's easier not to talk about these things. It's too lonely, and too close to grieving.

Instead Cam says, “Wanna see what I've got?” He reaches into his army pants. There's a crinkling. He pulls out three granola bars. “Expired, but whatever,” he says. “They'll still be good.”

My stomach growls. I hadn't noticed I was hungry. Cam offers me one. Chocolate chip and marshallow. My teeth ache over the honeyed oats. Cam sees my eye on the leftover bar.

“Wanna split it?” he says.