PostApoc (8 page)

- 14 -
STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE

“M
y ass is going to explode,” Tara says, hand over her cramping abdomen. She gulps. “I don't know if I can make it outside.” She lunges off the bedroom floor, sprints. Her boots clatter down the stairs.

“One of us will have to go with her,” I say.

Aimee sighs. “I'll do it.”

Because you can't just go. Alone, I mean. Like cats who squat carefully and cover up, we too are vulnerable this way now. You don't want a dog to come sniffing around when you've got your pants down in the yard. You don't want your presence to linger, so you dig a hole and cover it up.

You avoid digging into any earth that's freshly turned, but it's getting hard to find untouched soil. We've been using the garden by the back door but we'll probably have to find another spot soon. That one's easy for the buddy system because one person can sit on the back steps, weapon ready, watching. As long we can keep our backs against one wall, we figure we'll be fine.
There's less to guard that way.

Through the open window upstairs I can hear the pointed suck of air between Tara's teeth as she pushes through a cramp. Something wet and violent follows. Eventually she crawls back onto the mattress next to mine, sweating slightly.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I think so,” she says. “I just hope I got it all out.”

Aimee comes in with a stick still in her hand, now halved, its pale wood splintered at the break. “Almost got me,” she says, the loose collar of her light grey t-shirt sliding off her shoulder. Her left bicep flexes below an anchor tattooed in navy blue.

“Shit,” I say.

“Told you we should just kill those dogs,” Aimee says. “I have no idea why Cam will only let us hurt them if we have to.”

Voices from below. Strangers in the house.

“Who's that?” Aimee asks.

“It better not be anyone wanting to stay,” I say. “We've got enough people here already.”

“And they could steal our stuff,” Aimee says.

But downstairs it's all slow smiles, the grace of the trashed.

“These girls are cool,” Cam says, as if he heard us talking upstairs. “They're living in an old club downtown.” Cam's eyes are glazed, the movements of his mouth struggling through slack.

“Oh hey,” one of the girls says. Her blonde hair is so greasy it looks wet and two shades darker than it should be.

“They brought presents,” Cam says, turning to the girls. “Didn't you? Show them your presents.”

A girl with a kitten on her shoulder holds out pinched fingers gripping soft plastic caps of grayline.

Again?
I think, but then I see Aimee swallow hers.

The girl who told us her name is Brianne is showing me how to put patchouli in my pits, on the crotch of my jeans, or a light sprinkle in the pubic hair. “Keeps the scents covered, something I learned from a squeegee punk I got drunk with on Bathurst Street one summer,” she says.

My fingers touch, end to end, around my forearm. Starvation. I get up and patchouli follows.

Tara has her face pressed against the window, looking to be soothed. The grayline is kicking at us hard, making us writhe. Tara's ribs show under the thin black lace of her shirt. She twists, pouts, confuses the night's slouching stars for something close to snow.

I can't remember now when the last time was we had a full day. Something that had a beginning and an end. There's no sunset we've seen recently, no moon. The stars are there, though, constellations dropping so much light there's barely any dark left to cover ourselves with. We measure time now in cigarettes and bottles and guesses, while we've still got them.

Dragged down, briefly, into a swimming blackout.

Aimee's at my elbow. “Stand up and breathe,” she says, but it sounds like she's talking to Tara. Takes me a second to understand she's talking to me. In the living room Cam is drunk, sitting at the head of a circle. His words are sparks and glue. People nod, listen, rise and shout. I can't understand what he's saying but it doesn't seem like he's speaking to me anyway. He's preaching some story that's only meant to stay within his circle.

Aimee just smiles, oblivious, and flicks an eyebrow. Everyone is tripping tonight. “You feel it? You feel good?”

I do, I feel good. Except, suddenly, the back of my neck's got five pounds of hair on it and even when I hold it back phantom filaments cloak my shoulders. I can't get away from the heat.

And then a spin of the head and spots across the eyes. Outside now, puking up black string. My legs are limp behind me, sacks of fluid. Aimee's out here helping, holding me up, holding hair back while dark strands and foam hang from my chin.

Three cigarettes later a smaller darkness has come out of my head, a tangle of spiders' legs. My stomach rolls again and fresh strands fight to get past the back of my tongue. You'd never think a body could be this violent. This persistent. I don't know how I'm still puking up reams of black mass and froth on no food, nothing substantial at least. Every time another heave comes Aimee gasps for me, pants like this is trying to pull everything out of her, too.

I am a dead bulk; Aimee can barely hold me up. My eyes are mostly closed, rolling back. The night air is cold but my body holds heat throughout the trance. A narrow stream of sweat runs out of a patch of underarm hair, gets absorbed into Aimee's shoulder. She says when it hits her it's like ice, but everything I'm feeling is like fever, skin slippery, even at the knees of my jeans, spattered with foam and bile.

Aimee's got a hand on the bone between the places my breasts used to be and can feel every expansion of my lungs hitting the ribs beneath her palm. My body pitches forward again. Aimee keeps holding. Another stream trickles down from the arc of my neck. Aimee says I'm so pale I'm almost blue. Eyelids purple, blood vessels bursting from the pressure against my esophagus. My torso spasms, cheeks working up a slow spit. I ball out a final knot off the tip of my tongue. And then unconsciousness.

In my heart's left ventricle spins a dream of a small dog tied up outside a coffee shop. I bend to pet it and it jumps up, pulls against its leash. My palms cup to offer the dog something to lean into, to take the pressure off its neck.
Wet winter fur between its black calloused toes lands mid-palm, as if the dog's been walking through snow, even though this dream world is as dry as the real one. This is what happens when the body craves cold: its thirst comes through in dreams, snippets of past memories cutting through the steam.

I wake, now sweating against the bedroom floor. If I could move you'd probably find a damp imprint, moisture pooled underneath my right side. I'm sure, too, that there's a black ring of filth around the outsides of my lips, like makeup gone rotten. Something's sticky and dry there but my arm's too heavy to wipe it away.

There's a white pain in my stomach, which always hurts anyway so I shouldn't really care. I try to roll onto my back but my head spins too much. I press my ear against the floor and it gets pierced by a woman's voice from somewhere else in the house. Human or spirit, I can't be sure. Either way, her moan has a violent arrow quivering through it. A scrap of my brain signals fear, but I can't run and I can't fight. I can't do anything except ease into the chill that those female cries are sending through me.

I dream within a dream, see myself talking in my sleep, saying, “What gets under the skin, what's released from your pores.”

I am in my old bed, my home bed, the one before Valium, before Aimee, before now. On top of the covers, because it's too hot to be under them. I dream within a dream, see myself talking in my sleep, saying, “Unclean. Defile. Clench. Release.” My astral shoulder should be at the ceiling but even my soul-body is too sick to move.

I break out of the second layer of sleep when I hear, “Wake up.” I'm still on my old bed.

“Wake up,” someone says again.

The window's thrown a piece of clouded sun over me. Even though the light's gone grey behind the hovering smog its stickiness is still potent. The neck of my t-shirt is ringed in sweat, and the small of my back soaks through the fabric. My eyes close and my head fills with conversations, rapid-fire and hallucinatory. Time folds over itself, elapsing.

My neck is a stiff bridge, its foundations a tired ache. I turn my head and put my ear against the floor. When my cheek rolls onto the hardwood I'm braced for a drop in temperature but it's holding just as much heat as my body's fighting off. Still, I don't turn away—not yet.

Downstairs, there's no more screaming. No sound comes through the floor now, except irregular footsteps, weak scuffles operating on vitamin deficiencies and hangovers. Five feet away, cobwebs flutter in the ribs of the old radiator, moved by a draft I can't feel. I turn flat on my back again and something crunches in my neck. Up above, a fat black spider drops from the rafters, adding to an already enormous web full of silver spun sacks, fattened dead things.

I need a cigarette but I won't even try to walk. No one expects me to have my shit together and I don't. My knees cut a path through the dust of the floor and my hands are picking up pebbles, stones pressing into my flesh.

Downstairs, Aimee helps me into a chair. When she grabs me by the pits I find strength in my legs and probably don't need her to do this. But it feels good to be touched so I let her.

She brushes hair away from my face before turning to her frying pan full of something bubbling and grim. “You hungry?” she asks.

“I don't know,” I answer, lighting a cigarette from the pack sticking out of her back pocket.

“There's some bread left, peanut butter.”

She must have been out to City Hall earlier, picking up another care package. At least we'll have something for another few days.

Aimee scrapes a strip of peanut butter from the side of the jar, careful not to dip too far in just yet. We don't want to run out too soon. She gets enough on the knife to spread a thin layer across a crust of bread. She tears a spot of mold off another slice and presses it all together. My stomach growls unexpectedly as she holds the food out to me. I didn't feel hungry until now. I bite in, barely tasting the peanut butter, rushing into the next bite even though the bread's dry enough to make me choke.

I get it all down. Aimee sits across from me, asks if I'm tired. I lean my head against the wall to keep the room from spinning away.

- 15 -
CHINATOWN

C
am's guests are gone but they left behind for us their coughs, curtains of phlegm shaking deep in the caves of newly infected chests.

I cannot fight, my immunity thin, flailing. New bacteria sits under the skin, threatening a scratched throat, burnout and maximized exhaustion.

Beneath the shouts of wet lungs are Tara's sobs. She's been crying in a corner for hours, riding a hard craving since Trevor told her there wasn't any grayline left.

My head hasn't moved from the spot on the wall it's rested on since Aimee last fed me. I can't hold this pose a cigarette longer.

Aimee's down to her last smoke and the latest care package didn't have any packs inside. We ride all the way to Mike's on the strength of peanut butter sandwiches.

“I want you to tell me something this time,” Mike says, lips against my ear. My body reacts with a shiver and I hate myself for it.

“What do you want to know?” I ask. He sighs, like he's thinking very hard about this. I feel his chest and belly expand against me, filling the curve of my spine.

“Tell me a story,” he says.

I tell him about how me and Aimee used to fall into masses of oblivion, how sometimes at the Mission we could be raised overhead by crowds of hands, cresting over droning feedback. My body always moved like it had been through this before, had the familiarity of being saved. Aimee's stayed stiffer, on guard, braced for the floor as she sailed towards the stage, the soles of her Docs blurring over skulls, delicate faces. And around me, in the audience, bodies shook in time to a one-two beat, faces held high in salute to a boy whose face was red, a boy who screamed and screamed for us.

One night we were outside, between sets. The buzz of the last band had gotten in our ears, followed us everywhere. We didn't know this was called tinnitus. We thought we were just meant for it, made for it. That the music sunk into us, that we kept it alive.

It was December, two nights before Christmas. Half a foot of snow had fallen since we'd gotten to the Mission but it was too hot inside with all the energy buzzing around. Half the club had crowded onto the sidewalk, staining ice crystals with their boots and cigarette butts. Half the filth of the city stamped on a single corner.

Against the wall, a girl holding her hair, holding half of herself up. In my head it felt like it should already be two in the morning. A circle had formed in front of the stage. A group of guys were using the bare floor to slip onto their tailbones and slide on the studs of their thick silver belts. Their girlfriends laughed each time they went down, and the circle got wider each time someone's drink got spilled.

Above us, the last band sounded tired. Old. We were bored. It was the last show of the year. Aimee was staying at her cousin's house then. Her cousin and her husband were older, and they'd invited her to stay for a couple weeks over Christmas. She asked if I wanted to come back with her that night, sleepover.
There was a liquor cabinet, she promised, and Christmas wine, gifted and opened for early guests, leftover on the kitchen counter and in the side door of the fridge.

We snuck beers out of the club to drink on the ride out to the city's furthest edge. Aimee's cousin lived an hour away by public transit, a single streetcar ride but a long one in bad weather. The snow that night, it kept falling. A foot on the ground by last call.

The house was a fifteen-minute walk from the nearest streetcar stop. When we got off, the snow was untouched. At the city limits, it was easy to take one step outside at night and believe, entirely, that you were the only person left in the world.

Winter wetness got into the tops of our boots, chilled the steel toe caps. The front of our jeans were packed white. I slipped, came down hard on a patch of black ice. My beer bottle, still half-full, shattered in my parka pocket, and the smell of it instantly dripped through. Aimee, drunk, dipped her hand into my coat and scooped out a fistful of glass, kept walking. The next day my ass would be bruised, an entire cheek tinted blue, but Aimee's hand was perfectly intact, not a scratch of crimson marring the palm.

At the house we helped ourselves to half a bottle of red, half a bottle of white, and a box of chocolates, all already opened. Aimee only ate two candies but I couldn't stop, not even when I felt them solidify at the back of my throat, a globule of sugar I could scarcely push through.

We had to smoke outside. We were wasted by the time of our last smoke of the night, a necessary ritual to keep the nicotine levels going to sleep through eight hours.

I shivered in my parka, its lower half still wet from the busted beer. Aimee wobbled, could barely stand. I asked if I could brush my teeth. To get the sugar off, at least. Aimee said to use her toothbrush, pointed the way to the bathroom on her way up the stairs.

The lights were off in the bedroom when I got there, Aimee already passed out. The smell of beer clung all around us.

In the morning the middle of my calf was streaked with a light russet trail of dried Labatt
50
. I swung myself out of bed. Beside me, Aimee stayed still. She was always at her heaviest in her sleep.

My legs were bare but my parka was still wrapped around my shoulders, bunched at the wrists. Beneath the covers, a wealth of brown glass glinted.

Mike gives us each a pack of smokes and a mickey of gin. Aimee asks if he knows where we can get any grayline but all he says is, “Maybe, but I'd stay away from that stuff.”

“Too late,” we tell him, assuming his maybe means yes.

We ride back through Chinatown and see a restaurant with people in it.

“Wow,” Aimee says, slowing down across the street. “It looks like it's open, like they're serving.”

We're both hungry again.

“Let's go,” Aimee says.

Cam and Trevor heard rumours of a few restaurants that never closed, surviving on old grease, dried fat and rain water for boiling the meat of feral cats and stray dogs, just like those urban legends of Chinese restaurants that were serving lost pets in their chow mein.

We are more restless than wary. Hunger is secondary, but it's pushing through as soon as the smell of food hits us. Stomachs growl. The warmth of a steaming counter cuts through the dampness of the day. There are five other people seated at tables, two men in the window and three in a corner. They eye us but keep their chins to their plates.

The menu is sparse. Most of it has been blacked out by marker, leaving noodles, rice, and meat. We order the noodles and pay in cigarettes, five each.

Aimee leans back in her chair and slides her boots off, puts her feet in my lap. Her socks have turned grey and her toes flash pink through the holes in their tops.

No one in the restaurant talks.
There is no music playing in the background, no buses chugging by outside. Without the voices of others filling in the blanks for us, we cautiously stretch into the void as two steaming bowls slide in front of us. The noodles glisten between chopsticks, slide out of the slick grip, and eventually I give up and grab for a chunk of the lavender-grey meat that's been laid overtop.

“I didn't know this came with meat,” Aimee says. She turns to the counter. “Excuse me? Excuse me?” The cook looks up but doesn't smile. “Excuse me? What kind of meat is this?” The cook looks down, shakes his head, worries a cloth over an imaginary spot on the counter.

The meat squishes between my teeth. Bland juice squirts across my tongue.

Aimee is rolling a piece of meat around in her mouth, face hesitant. Whatever it is, she doesn't want to let it inside of her and instead spits it down the side of the table, onto the floor. If anyone notices, they don't say anything.

A rush of saliva helps me get mine down, even though I immediately regret swallowing it and wish I had done like Aimee.

“I wonder if this
is
where the wild dogs end up when they die,” she asks, tackling a strand of white in her bowl.

Aimee and I clamp our noodles and slurp at the same time. They are salt and rubber, tunneling bodies squirming on tongues. Our bowls are full of worms, wriggling. Over my shoulder, the two men in the corner lift their last mouthfuls, long white noodles hanging limp.

“I can't eat this,” I say.

Aimee's already pushed hers away. She waits at the counter while I walk to the washroom, hoping for water, just something to splash my face with. The stench keeps me from getting both feet inside. The toilet is full to the top, floating with brown and yellow. Gobs of toilet paper have soaked into a deep gold along the top. In front of it, a tall red bucket, it too full of human water and waste.
Around the back and base of the toilet are low piles of old bunches of toilet paper and napkins and torn newspaper pages, all smeared with dried shit.

I could gag but trace amounts of remaining grayline won't let me. It keeps the throat and esophagus as tight and tense as the rest of the body, everything on high alert.

Aimee is already outside, waiting by our bikes. We zigzag between lines of dead cars along Spadina Avenue, coasting tight between their warts of rust. They'll slice you good, those cars.

We stop on the porch of a torched house and break into the gin. The smokes are fresh, for once, and the first drags hit us as if they're the first ones we've had all day. Aimee tests her weight on the wooden boards before lying all the way back. We keep the bottle tucked between us, in case anyone passes by and asks for a sip. Not that we've seen anyone since the restaurant, but you never know. We're three shots in, each, when we hear, “Hey!”

We sit up too fast. Heads rush, underlining an early buzz. We look ahead but see no one.

“Hey!” It comes again. “Up here.”

An arm waves from a window next door, a dirty blonde head calling us over. “Me and my sister are
dy
ing to talk to someone else,” she says. “We've been stuck with each other for
days
.”

The two girls lie together on the same bed. Close up the dirty blonde looks like she might be younger than I thought. Her hair's streaked with grease and she's left her blue denim shirt unbuttoned. A plain white bra underneath is striped with dark yellow sweat.

“I'm Carla. This is Jenna,” she says, pointing to the darker haired girl. They don't look like sisters at all.
Jenna's hair is thick, wavy, her skin a deeper tone than Carla's.

Carla pulls something out of her shirt pocket that looks like a joint. She lights it up with a wooden match but when it starts to blaze it doesn't smell like pot. More like incense—cinnamon and jasmine. She offers me a pull. Its taste is mild and white, like chalk.

“What is this?” I ask.

Carla shrugs. “Our roommate got it for us. I can't remember what it's called.” She looks at Jenna for help, but Jenna just stares ahead, doesn't even make an effort to answer. “I think he said it was called ‘ashelle.' Whatever it is, it's good. Better than weed.”

“Yeah,” Jenna says, finally.

Carla laughs at her sister. “The ashelle's on her, that's why she's so quiet.”

It must be on me, too, because everything Carla says makes her sound like she talking through an underwater helmet.

Sweat's collected along Aimee's upper lip. I thirst for it, lean into her. She lets me stay on her face.

When I pull away, Carla's face has split sideways she's grinning so wide. “The ashelle's on you, too,” she says, and rubs Aimee's back. “Just go with it,” she says, over and over.

Rare for Aimee to have a bad trip, I'd told Carla when it hit. I think of the mickey in my bag, wondering if the alcohol had anything to do with it.

“It's a good buzz, right?” Carla asks Aimee. I know what she's doing: mind control, hypnosis of the trip. It's an old trick but one we've all had to use before.

Since my kiss with Aimee my mouth has been secreting salt, limbs threatening seizure. I want another shot but don't want to share. Just because Carla gave something to us doesn't mean we have to do the same.

“It's a good buzz,” Aimee says.

I manage to count the spark of matches around me. Eight cigarettes later, at six minutes a cigarette, must be bringing us to close to an hour into this buzz. The salt in my mouth has mostly been swallowed. My vision is something less than blind. I sit up.

“Now you'll really start to feel good,” I hear Carla say to Aimee.

Finally, Aimee asks, “Do you want to get out of here?” and I realize I'd been waiting for those words, because, yes, I do.

Back at the house there's a girl grinding Cam's crotch. Me and Aimee are still buzzing, but we can't tell if it's from whatever it was we smoked earlier, or if it's from the rest of the mickey we killed on the way back.

Every voice in the house is amplified. “Want to go to the third floor?” Aimee asks.

No one's been to the third floor since Brandy and Camille were up there. The windows are stained glass, smaller than the windows in the rest of the house. The light seems only to hit the blue panes, holding everything in frosted incandescence. I have to duck my head under the low ceiling, wonder if the walls are shrinking in on us.