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Authors: Liz Worth

PostApoc (9 page)

BOOK: PostApoc
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Aimee wobbles to the center of the room and flops to the floor. Her eyes roll around in their sockets too slowly, like someone's poured syrup all over them. She lights a cigarette and exhales a dragon cloud of smoke. With her head tilted back I can see gaps where she's missing teeth. Must be recent, those losses. Mine aren't loose yet, but they will be soon enough.

“So this is it,” Aimee says. I can tell she's fighting to focus her eyes on the corners of the room to watch for moving shadows.

Tara comes up the stairs. “You two were gone forever,” she says.

“Really? How long?” I ask. The words are slower in my mouth than they should be.

Tara doesn't answer. Instead, “Look what I got off Cam.” She holds out a joint. I can smell the weed. It's the real thing.

“Really? He gave that to you?”

“Well, no, not really. I took it from him,” she says. “So don't tell, k?”

She lights up and inhales, bends close to offer her mouth and breathe it all into my lungs. Her legs are bare, glowing blue in the light of the room as she shifts towards Aimee to pass her the joint.Aimee barely registers. Tara shrugs and sits back beside me.

“You fucked up or what?” she says.

But before I make a move to answer, a wing sprouts from Tara's leg. It starts with dark brown stems and then pops out turquoise tips, white feathers freckled with grey and black. Tara doesn't move, too busy holding smoke in her chest. The wing is long enough for it to beat against the floor. It flaps until it falls off of Tara's leg, becomes bodiless, independent.

This is when I decide to go back downstairs.

The pot smoke's brought the noise level down from where it was when I first got here. Cam's still with the girl, says her name is Melanie. He found her hanging around outside and invited her in. He likes to believe he's saving people sometimes. I can tell by looking at her she's the kind of girl who's always bumming cigarettes without bothering to remember your name. Wonder she's made it alive this long.

Cam says, “Melanie's gonna stay with us tonight.”

Brandy's been too sick to speak lately but now she steps up, her studded jacket clanking. “Just tonight though right, Cam?” she says from the door.

We all maintain unspoken rules. Visitors are fine, but they can't live here. We've only got so much. One extra person means less moldy bread to go around.

“I told you to get off my case,” Cam says.

Brandy pulls half her face behind the doorframe and glares, but it's Melanie's face that's red, gone timid.

“I have a place you know,” Melanie says, the statement only vaguely directed at the room. “I was just gonna crash because, you know, Cam asked me, that's all.”

Aimee interrupts any further conversation by walking in. Her eyes are so glazed they could leak. Her hand is out, extended for Melanie's.
The girl's hand stays limp but her eyes are wired to the pointed bone of Aimee's wrist, the fox skull tattooed over her veins. Neither of them offer their names. No one else offers introductions.

Aimee pulls me onto her lap and wraps her legs around my back. My throat is still tender from the drugs upstairs but I can't stop another wave of high from hitting me and then every inch of potential noise that's left in the city is collecting in a single building—our house—and we're building it all, breathing it all in through thick droplets of air, me and Aimee in one corner admiring the oiled silk of our dirty hair, the way hers glints gold and red and mine casts snow even in the thud of light, and in another corner, Cam's got a semicircle going around the back of the room and the only word they keep saying is survival survival survival survival survival until it's a prayer, a practice in hypnosis. And Brandy and Carrie are still wearing their studded jackets, playing the same song over and over, a chant in counterbalance to Cam's, the Exploited hurling sex and violence and sex and violence and sex and violence from a tinny boombox and I can't believe someone's salvaged batteries just for that because I always hated that song but love it right now because the sounds we thought would be with us always, in either world, old or new or dying, couldn't follow us here because so many of us forgot to save things like batteries or ran them down too early. And everything gets louder and louder between the walls that we've declared to be ours until we own what we believe, in this moment, to be the last wall of sound that will ever exist and we are responsible for it and we are responsible for it and we are responsible for it.

We lose time, like usual, and speculate about UFOs: alien abduction, identity theft, physical probing into supernatural phenomenon of the six-six-sixth senses.

Melanie hasn't slept since she got here. You can smell it on her, the night sweat that clings to sleeplessness and burnout. If she's overstayed her one-night welcome none of us know for sure.

Melanie's soles have armour. They're so calloused they scrape the floor, wake us up in what we guess might be the morning.

I remember her saying, at some point in the night, that she likes the boots we all wear, us girls.

“Can I try a pair?” she asked. Tara had a newer pair, recently looted, still stiff.

“Here, you can break these in for me,” she said to Melanie, handing them over by their laces like stiff kittens dangling by their scruffs.

“Cool,” Melanie said, sliding her naked foot inside the hard leather.

Today she's gliding over the floor, keeping her legs straight. Tara's boots have eaten into Melanie's heels. She stops every few feet just to take a drag of her cigarette, which I saw her sneak from Cam's pack. She accentuates her inhalations with the pain of her blisters.

My head is broken up into aching compartments and my mouth is coated with whiskey piss. I want Melanie to quiet the fuck down.

“What. Are. You. Doing,” I ask her.

“My feet are fucked up,” she says. “It hurts to walk.”

“Why don't you try crawling?”

Not that I could walk either right now. I can only smoke, already too awake from these few words. I puff out a perfect circle. A fat O floats over my face.

Melanie lays her cheek on the edge of my mattress. She asks for a drag even though she just put a cigarette out. She's on all fours now. I was only joking when I suggested she crawl.

The swelling of her Achilles tendon has plumped up and bruised the soft grooves of her ankle, filling out the curves between round and thin bones. A blister has broken, leaking something clear and sticky. Its center is black and its outline screams with temper.

“I think it's infected,” she says, following my eyes. A curl of smoke gets in my gaze and the world goes lopsided. We don't have supplies to spare to clean her up.

“You shouldn't wear boots with no socks on,” Tara says, walking up behind Melanie. “The steel will wear right through the inner lining and scrape against your toes, take your nails right off. I've seen it happen.”

Melanie just pushes out her jaw and stares.

“We could leave, you know.”

I say this to Aimee as I finger the key to my parents' house, still in my pocket. We are in Aimee's bed, spooning.

“Do you think we could do it? Be on our own, I mean?” she asks.

“Why not?”

“It's less protection, less connections.”

“But maybe things could be better somewhere else.” As I say this, a thud vibrates through the house, like something—or someone—heavy just fell hard against a wall.

“I heard they still have chocolate in Montreal,” Aimee says. “And I heard part of their subway still runs sometimes.”

Downstairs someone's either laughing or crying. Or both.

“I wasn't thinking that far, but—”

“So where?”

“My parents' house. It's empty. It could be ours. We don't have to stay there all the time, but just for a little bit. Just to get away from this.”

“But what about food? Picking up care packages?”

“What about privacy? What about doors we can lock?”

“Okay,” Aimee says. “We can go.”

- 16 -
FROM THE INSIDE OUT

N
o goodbyes, no information. We don't want anyone to know where we are. We don't want anyone to follow us.

Tara's made it easy to avoid her. She woke up with her hand out, asking to go and do a pick up with us. Me and Aimee agreed we'd never go to a dealer's place alone. We should do the same for Tara but we don't, instead told her we had to meet someone today, “a friend we promised to help.” So she left a little while ago. We don't ask if she went with anyone.

No one's seen what we've put into the bags on our backs. No one knows we've taken all we can. And so no one asks when we pick our way to our bikes. No one asks if, or even when, we'll be back.

It's raining when we get outside. We cup our hands and drink from a bucket of rainwater in the yard before we push off. The hydration goes right to my head, clarifies.

We ride.

We're breathless by Queen and Portland.
Aimee's at her calf, wiping at a cut that opened from the graze of a rusting car.

“Should I be worried?” she asks. “Like, is tetanus an actual thing?”

I shrug. “I don't know. Didn't we all have to get shots for that?”

“Yeah,” Aimee says. “Maybe.”

“You shouldn't be out here.”

The voice comes from behind me, belongs to a head of red hair shot with grey, a chin that's pocked with early signs of aging.

There used to be a club here, its entrance adorned in spires, wrought iron spirals. The door's off its hinges now, metal links bent at impossible angles. In its place a curtain, four inches of it drifting off the doorframe, enough to show the dancefloor. I see one, two, three pale bodies on their backs. One of them moans, rolls over.

“Come inside.”

The request comes from inside the club, but it's too dark to see who it's coming from.

“Nice boots, wanna fuck?”

Through the slit of the curtain I can see a bloated body crawling limbless like a slug, one eye shut and the other sitting low on a distended cheek, mouth an exaggerated sag.

“Go,” someone says.

We get back on our bikes and we ride, take short breaks every few miles. Even when we were at our most nourished, this ride would have been hard for our smokers' lungs, boozers' endurance. Between breaths come the excited gasps over clean sheets, quiet rooms and privacy.

We turn left onto my old block and stop at the neighbour's yard. The front window's been smashed out, frame clean of any panes, but there are still patches of pale green in the grass. Aimee scoops out a fistful by the roots and hands me a chunk. “Eat it,” she says, “so we don't get scurvy.”

The corpse of a cat is only a few feet away from where the blades of grass grew. Its belly is a dried slit, but the blood's yet to trade all of its red for brown. “Looks fresh,” Aimee says, chewing through her words.

Russet circles of toothless stains have spread across the bedspread in my parents' bedroom.
Were they there a few days ago? Am I so contaminated that I left behind an imprint?

Aimee's oblivious, lying back, right hand in the dead center of a stain. The comforter looks like it carries a contagion factor, like it's leaking from the inside out. There are stains on the floor and ceiling, too, but they're smaller, easier to avoid, which is what I do as I will the house to settle around me.

Something scrapes against a wall a floor below—a fingernail or a picture frame. Something with just enough of an edge to catch on our nerves.

Both of us at the same time: “Did you hear that?”

Darkness falls. Like the house has placed a phantom hand over our eyes. A finger catches in the dip of my throat, presses. I try to push it away but nothing's there.

The foundation gives, tilts the house to the left.

“Ang?” Aimee says.

It's still daylight but everything's gone black, as if the darkness is coming from the house itself.

Something like a man's breath is at my cheek. It comes at the moment when I know I truly have nothing anymore, not even the hope of spending one night in this house. Ever since the flames became the same colour as the sky, this city has been stealing my sleep, cutting at the youth that used to be my face. Black and curls of orange could have filled us in seconds but instead, we ran. If I'd known we were running just to be left with nothing, maybe I wouldn't have moved so quickly.

Something oozes out of the carpet beneath my knees. Something else drips onto Aimee's hair. The house is rotting at hyper-speed.

The ceiling fan comes down on Aimee. “Shit!” she says.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“I don't know.”

Pressure on my chest. The phantom's angry finger, its silent accusations, poking a throbbing trail down the front of me. What do you do when there are no more rules? What do you when nothing is what it used to be?

You give in, you give up, you get out, or you get up.

I used to know the staircase by heart, walked it a hundred times drunk in the pitch dark. I've let too much time pass to keep it all in my head. I miss the very first step and tumble down. Aimee is only seconds behind.

We crawl to the front door because the house won't let any light in even from the windows downstairs. Outside, the blindfold lifts, vision is restored. We fly off the front steps just as the tip of the roof caves in, the rest of the house collapsing beneath it.

When there are no more rules, it's hard to tell whether you should cry or just move on. For now, we just move.

BOOK: PostApoc
8.67Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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