Here's the second part of Part 2, Chapter 2. I'll post the next chapter on June 4th. Enjoy your weekend. I'll be busy moving house!
Dave
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2 (Continued)
Mistress Sylvia arranges to have a group meeting during that evening’s meal. I’ve been in Mecca only one day and already things have started to crumble. My emotions swing between relief, elation, unease, and fear. Mistress Sylvia’s very existence as female gives mankind hope and brings me to a euphoric mood, yet the bizarre politics of Mecca give me the opposite sensation. Mistress Sylvia’s matriarchy, the almost complete submission of the men, and that afternoon’s shooting, means I’m afraid this whole system could topple at any moment.
I’m not sure if I want the system to topple or not, but I know I don’t want to be left here alone.
“This afternoon’s events were very unfortunate,” Mistress Sylvia addresses the gathered audience in the evening. “We lost a valuable member of Mecca and another equally valued member is seriously injured. We’re lucky this second individual didn’t also die, considering the amount of blood he lost. For that we must thank our resident medical expert, Dr. Evans.” I don’t know how much blood the human body must lose in order for an individual to die, but the carpet of our old room is soaked. There was so much blood that Nicolas had to reappear and move Hank, James, and I into the next room down the hall, which has an almost identical layout. When I collected my bags, I took in the blood saturated carpet and the light splatter of red on my backpack. My stomach churned, but my mind was numb.
“These events have been very unfortunate and unsettling, but they do raise important issues about the survival of our group.
“Philip’s anger concerned our open door policy and I know that this is an element of antagonism for a few more of you in this room.” A few glances pass across the crowd and there’s the occasional nod. “I’m going to answer this simply and definitively. Being selective of who we allow to join our group during our infancy can only stunt our future development and growth. The more men we have, the more work we can do, the more farming and construction, the more salvaging and reconnaissance. Were we to select our members through elitist methods, we would find that, rather than ourselves nurturing and busying those fragile minds through Mecca’s system, they would waste their efforts on futile endeavors, living for the moment, inadequately pushing for nothing, which wouldn’t help anybody. Chaos would soon reign outside our doors. You all remember what it was like prior to this organization. It was only a few days ago. You all remembered how it was if you crossed an angry, desperate looter’s path. Well, it was an unsafe time.
“Gentlemen, let us forget this pointless antagonism. I think I’ve made my point and I don’t feel the need to talk on it any further. Case closed.” Mistress Sylvia relaxes her stern expression, breaths out a sigh, and moves on to the next topic: the status of the electrical system. Members of the audience pass confused faces, but Mistress Sylvia carries on regardless. I know many of us wonder if perhaps the topic isn’t yet exhausted. I look at those around me and see discontent brewing in postures and expressions. Thomas is the first to raise his voice and ask, very politely, very cautiously, “if perhaps, if at all possible, could we return to the subject on our minds? A man has been murdered, after all. I think there might be more to say.”
Mistress Sylvia turns to face Thomas, with an expression of stone. Around me, I see wide eyes and slack jaws. Amazment that anybody could muster the courage to argue with the matriarch. The problem with crowds is that each individual becomes too afraid to act out alone — we fear ostracization. As more men submitted to Mistress Sylvia over the past few days, others found themselves following the crowd and also submitting to her authority, regardless of their own specific views and feelings.
“Go on,” Mistress Sylvia says with a rigid face. “Do explain.”
“Well,” Thomas says, suddenly self-conscious under the woman’s gaze, kicking his feet against the ground. “Well, I would like to say, to mention, that our growth is limited anyway, by pure physical and, um, biological factors. You’re the only woman here, obviously, and once we stop gaining new men, once we’re the only people left in Pittsburgh, our growth will be limited by the amount of children you can have anyway. Then we won’t grow at all for sixteen years or so, when your daughters are old enough to have children themselves.” The energy from the crowd drives him on. “So it seems to make sense that growing to huge numbers right now isn’t too important, right? We don’t need a huge foundation for society, because when we all grow old and die and leave only your offspring, numbers are going to be limited anyway. It just seems like another one of those futile endeavors you were talking about, right?” He coughs. “We’ll that’s the way I see things.”
There are a few murmurs of agreement and other mutters to the contrary. Mistress Sylvia speaks in a calm, quiet tone. “Point noted. Thank you, Thomas.” She pulls her iron gaze away from him and resumes her lecture on the timetable for electric lighting.
*
That night, in my new bed, with a distressed Hank and James nearby, I dream that I’m acting in a play about superheroes. The performance takes place in an old theatre; the seats stretching away, fading into darkness, row after row of upper bodies with staring eyes. I play the lead and my costume involves wearing a mask made from a radio set. I have a superhero name like The Boomboxer. My outfit makes me feel like an authentic actor and fills me with pride and confidence — like here I am, representing the Royal Shakespeare Company with a boombox over my face. Once I enter the stage, after watching the play from the wings for a while, I realize that I haven’t looked at my lines. I don’t panic or worry, I am an actor-superhero after all, (a trained Shakespearian even!) and so I improvise the lines and stage movements as I go along, much to the distress of the other professionals on stage. I’ve no idea when I should enter or exit, so I enter and exit whenever the whim strikes me. Sometimes I’ll yell, cry out, tell a joke, muse on one topic or another, and exit-left mid-sentence.
I hear one co-star, the villain of the play, mutter, “That was the worst exit possible,” at the end of one scene, but I don’t care because I’m a superhero-actor. The villain must be an amateur.
The audience chuckles upon observing me at such a loss, but I’m pleased to be entertaining them. One character, my superhero sidekick, mentions that we can find the villain at a chocolate factory. Having had a script thrust upon me by a stagehand I make the mistake of reading my sidekick’s next line rather than my own. “Yes, my favorite is a Milky Way.” I was amazed, both that we were advertising confectionary brands in our play and that the bearded director hadn’t dropped the curtains two scenes back.
The play didn’t end. It would never end. Instead, I simply drifted back into waking.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 2
Part 2, Chapter 2, is fairly long and episodic, so I'm posting it in two parts. For the record, this is one of my favourite chapters from the early parts of this book. I really enjoyed taking the Mecca setting to a darker place, and playing with the flash-backs. I think you get to see the darker sides of all the characters involved.
Enjoy it.
Dave.
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2
James and I spend that afternoon in the common room. Various men pass through the area, but everyone seems busy with their assigned tasks. Mistress Sylvia has provided a distinct sense of purpose for these men and the strength of the work ethic at Mecca is incredible. Some people, of course, are more polite to us than others. Everybody’s been through a tough time, so I can’t resent those who come across as rude or impatient. Michael, for instance, thick bearded and from the Northside, has little time for us. Maybe it’s because he sees so many new people every day and has little energy left to reintroduce himself. He tells us, “we had better show respect to the Mistress,” and that, “She’s all that’s holding civilization together now.” He begins to walk away, but then ducks back into the room, and to prove his loyalty, informs us that he was the one who took the Warhol for Sylvia. “That’s right. The same one that’s hung at the back of her office.” I couldn’t have cared less.
James and I find a Monopoly set and half-heartedly play a game with another newcomer, Ethan, who hails from the Hill District. I place three houses on the orange tiles and Thomas, a big-shouldered, short-legged guy from the South Hills, joins our table to talk. When the plague took full effect in the suburbs, he drove through the snow and into the city to try to find other survivors. He arrived as the chaos in the Southside began to abate and thus he was one of the first to find the newly formed Mecca enclave. “So that almost makes me a founding father of our new state,” he laughs. “A regular old Benjamin Franklin.”
I like Thomas; I like his smile and humorous demeanor. Ethan, who I’m playing Monopoly with, also seems like a good guy. It’s unfortunate that Ethan is so severely shell-shocked. It makes him both a victim and a pawn. He jumps at the sound of dropped saucepans, or at the sudden commencement of hammering, which happens to be a regular occurrence.
Fifteen minutes later, our Monopoly game is still going well. I pick up a Chance card when we’re interrupted by yells from the stairwell. Yells from the floor above us. The floor our room is on.
“No, fuck you!” an unfamiliar voice yells. “We ain’t a fuckin’ charity!”
The door into the stairwell is open and the sound of the conflict carries down to us all, alert, sat upright, with dice in hand. Every other man in the common room stops what he’s doing and listens with their eyes towards the ceiling.
“Well who the fuck are you? This isn’t any of your business. You’re not quality control.”
“So, I was asking him a question and you have to go butting in—”
“You’re asking him what gives him the right to come in here, and, man—”
“Just a fucking question!”
I can hear Hank upstairs, muttering in apology, “Guys, guys. Please.” My heart pounds when I identify his voice. I realize how profusely I’m sweating. My eyes widen. James looks to me. A mask of worry.
“The Mistress says anybody is welcome.”
“Fuck that! Just because someone arrives — we need some quality control. Who is this guy? Who are you, even? A fucking psycho-murderer? How the fuck would I know? Before all this, you could have been anybody. How do I know who I can and can’t trust to even sleep in the same building as me?”
Already, men are scrambling for the stairwell, both to break up the hostilities and to get a good view of the action. I rise from my own seat too, but it’s short-legged Thomas who’s in front of the gathering crowd.
“You’re crazy. It’s you we shouldn’t have let in.”
“I’m crazy?”
“Guys!” Hank finds the confidence to yell, “Jesus, please, guys!”
“Hey! You shut up and stay the fuck out of this. DON’T TOUCH ME!”
Then there’s a clamor of yelling. Other men have arrived in the room of conflict, and I’m certain that it’s my room, and so I’m running for the stairwell, pushing people aside. Somebody’s yelling, “Put the gun down!” Somebody else is yelling, “Philip” and “Calm down!” But then a gun discharges and the noise booms through the building. Everyone around me ducks. Perhaps somewhere below, Mistress Sylvia is stirring in her boudoir. There’s a scuffle and the gunman is tackled. He screams: “FUCK YOU” “GET THE FUCK OFF ME” “ASSHOLES!” I get to the hallway and see the open door at the far end. Three men run through it into the room. Several others back away with no intention of getting involved. The gun discharges again. Yells. “GO TO HELL!” Punching. Screams. A blonde-haired man in jeans and a hooded jacket is dragged into the hallway and is beaten upon by two other individuals. One of them is Thomas. A kick to the face bloodies Blonde-Hair. On his side, on the ground, Blonde-Hair doubles up from another kick to the stomach. Somebody’s screaming “MY ARM!” Somebody else is dead.
*
I watch as a man staggers from the room, bleeding from the arm, supported by another man in a baseball cap. The gunman is unconscious, down the hall from me, and blood drips from his nose onto the carpet. Thomas binds the gunman’s arms together with electrical tape. I suppose Thomas is not entirely the victim I thought him to be.
Hank yells from the room, “No, don’t move him,” and the relief is palpable because Hank, one of my few allies in this bizarre dream, is safe. My sweat turns cold as the adrenaline subsides.
Somebody says someone else is dead. “That’s it, man. It’s over.” Someone wants to apply a tourniquet but someone else spits out the bitter question, “How the hell do you suppose we wrap a tourniquet around that? He’s dead.”
Hank cries because this man died to defend Hank’s life. He’s blubbering and somebody says, “Shut up,” and the third voice says he’s sorry.
There’s more clamor and commotion when someone retrieves the gun from the ground. Cries of, “Be careful.”
The wounded man pushes past me on the hallway and heads down the staircase. He emits a weak, “Excuse me, kid.”
Two more men carry the dead body out between them and I back down the corridor to make space. Wrapped in a large coat, the body drips blood to the ground. It leaves a trail of red spots behind it as if plotting its journey through death. I don’t want to call it the body but I can’t think of any other appropriate terms to use.
“Did anyone know him?” a man with red hair asks. “What’s his name?”
Nobody knows.
“What’s going on?” Mistress Sylvia shouts from below.
The clamor makes me dizzy. I need to be alone. I need to think.
*
After the riot in Oakland, I carried the young woman, who was bleeding from the leg, back to my apartment. Emily helped me set her down on the couch.
My jeans hung loose because I’d wrapped my belt around the girl’s leg in an attempt to stem the blood loss.
“Can you hear me?” Emily asked the woman, and pulled up the trouser leg to reveal the wound. She grimaced and turned to me. “You may have saved her life, you know.”
“Well, don’t jinx her,” I say without humor, and then after a pause, “There are no ambulances now. Do you think the cops would have just left her there?”
“We both know the answer to that.”
At that moment, the police were mopping up the stragglers left on the university campus and then moving on to South Oakland and across into Southside. The next day, Emily and I had our suspicion confirmed. The police were far too busy to help the wounded or move the dead. They should have removed and burned the bodies because they were a plague containment issue, but the morning news informed us that, by now, containing the plague was a futile effort and a waste of valuable resources.
When the wounded woman regained consciousness, she told us that her name was Laura. We cared for her through the evening, treated her wound, and brought her food.
In the early hours of the next day, Laura’s coughing woke us both.
“She’s caught it?” Emily asked in a whisper. “G9?”
“Then she’s got to go,” I replied.
After a false start, I mustered the courage to confront Laura with our ultimatum. I knelt down next to her in the darkness of the studio. I held a moist t-shirt over my mouth and nose and glanced back at Emily, who lay in the bed covering her own face with a wet towel. She nodded at me and I turned again to speak to the worried girl.
“If you’re infected — then you can’t stay.” I said through the wet fabric.
“But—”
“There’s no cure. We all know that. And we can’t run the risk of letting you infect us. So you can’t stay. You have to leave.”
Laura rolled on her back and craned her neck to look towards the window. Snow fell outside. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” she asked. “At least until the snow stops.”
I sighed and looked towards Emily again. She shuffled as if she was about to get up and talk to Laura herself. We couldn’t afford a discussion on the matter. “No, it has to be now. You have to leave now.”
Emily developed symptoms of the G9 virus the next afternoon.
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Continues here.
Enjoy it.
Dave.
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2
James and I spend that afternoon in the common room. Various men pass through the area, but everyone seems busy with their assigned tasks. Mistress Sylvia has provided a distinct sense of purpose for these men and the strength of the work ethic at Mecca is incredible. Some people, of course, are more polite to us than others. Everybody’s been through a tough time, so I can’t resent those who come across as rude or impatient. Michael, for instance, thick bearded and from the Northside, has little time for us. Maybe it’s because he sees so many new people every day and has little energy left to reintroduce himself. He tells us, “we had better show respect to the Mistress,” and that, “She’s all that’s holding civilization together now.” He begins to walk away, but then ducks back into the room, and to prove his loyalty, informs us that he was the one who took the Warhol for Sylvia. “That’s right. The same one that’s hung at the back of her office.” I couldn’t have cared less.
James and I find a Monopoly set and half-heartedly play a game with another newcomer, Ethan, who hails from the Hill District. I place three houses on the orange tiles and Thomas, a big-shouldered, short-legged guy from the South Hills, joins our table to talk. When the plague took full effect in the suburbs, he drove through the snow and into the city to try to find other survivors. He arrived as the chaos in the Southside began to abate and thus he was one of the first to find the newly formed Mecca enclave. “So that almost makes me a founding father of our new state,” he laughs. “A regular old Benjamin Franklin.”
I like Thomas; I like his smile and humorous demeanor. Ethan, who I’m playing Monopoly with, also seems like a good guy. It’s unfortunate that Ethan is so severely shell-shocked. It makes him both a victim and a pawn. He jumps at the sound of dropped saucepans, or at the sudden commencement of hammering, which happens to be a regular occurrence.
Fifteen minutes later, our Monopoly game is still going well. I pick up a Chance card when we’re interrupted by yells from the stairwell. Yells from the floor above us. The floor our room is on.
“No, fuck you!” an unfamiliar voice yells. “We ain’t a fuckin’ charity!”
The door into the stairwell is open and the sound of the conflict carries down to us all, alert, sat upright, with dice in hand. Every other man in the common room stops what he’s doing and listens with their eyes towards the ceiling.
“Well who the fuck are you? This isn’t any of your business. You’re not quality control.”
“So, I was asking him a question and you have to go butting in—”
“You’re asking him what gives him the right to come in here, and, man—”
“Just a fucking question!”
I can hear Hank upstairs, muttering in apology, “Guys, guys. Please.” My heart pounds when I identify his voice. I realize how profusely I’m sweating. My eyes widen. James looks to me. A mask of worry.
“The Mistress says anybody is welcome.”
“Fuck that! Just because someone arrives — we need some quality control. Who is this guy? Who are you, even? A fucking psycho-murderer? How the fuck would I know? Before all this, you could have been anybody. How do I know who I can and can’t trust to even sleep in the same building as me?”
Already, men are scrambling for the stairwell, both to break up the hostilities and to get a good view of the action. I rise from my own seat too, but it’s short-legged Thomas who’s in front of the gathering crowd.
“You’re crazy. It’s you we shouldn’t have let in.”
“I’m crazy?”
“Guys!” Hank finds the confidence to yell, “Jesus, please, guys!”
“Hey! You shut up and stay the fuck out of this. DON’T TOUCH ME!”
Then there’s a clamor of yelling. Other men have arrived in the room of conflict, and I’m certain that it’s my room, and so I’m running for the stairwell, pushing people aside. Somebody’s yelling, “Put the gun down!” Somebody else is yelling, “Philip” and “Calm down!” But then a gun discharges and the noise booms through the building. Everyone around me ducks. Perhaps somewhere below, Mistress Sylvia is stirring in her boudoir. There’s a scuffle and the gunman is tackled. He screams: “FUCK YOU” “GET THE FUCK OFF ME” “ASSHOLES!” I get to the hallway and see the open door at the far end. Three men run through it into the room. Several others back away with no intention of getting involved. The gun discharges again. Yells. “GO TO HELL!” Punching. Screams. A blonde-haired man in jeans and a hooded jacket is dragged into the hallway and is beaten upon by two other individuals. One of them is Thomas. A kick to the face bloodies Blonde-Hair. On his side, on the ground, Blonde-Hair doubles up from another kick to the stomach. Somebody’s screaming “MY ARM!” Somebody else is dead.
*
I watch as a man staggers from the room, bleeding from the arm, supported by another man in a baseball cap. The gunman is unconscious, down the hall from me, and blood drips from his nose onto the carpet. Thomas binds the gunman’s arms together with electrical tape. I suppose Thomas is not entirely the victim I thought him to be.
Hank yells from the room, “No, don’t move him,” and the relief is palpable because Hank, one of my few allies in this bizarre dream, is safe. My sweat turns cold as the adrenaline subsides.
Somebody says someone else is dead. “That’s it, man. It’s over.” Someone wants to apply a tourniquet but someone else spits out the bitter question, “How the hell do you suppose we wrap a tourniquet around that? He’s dead.”
Hank cries because this man died to defend Hank’s life. He’s blubbering and somebody says, “Shut up,” and the third voice says he’s sorry.
There’s more clamor and commotion when someone retrieves the gun from the ground. Cries of, “Be careful.”
The wounded man pushes past me on the hallway and heads down the staircase. He emits a weak, “Excuse me, kid.”
Two more men carry the dead body out between them and I back down the corridor to make space. Wrapped in a large coat, the body drips blood to the ground. It leaves a trail of red spots behind it as if plotting its journey through death. I don’t want to call it the body but I can’t think of any other appropriate terms to use.
“Did anyone know him?” a man with red hair asks. “What’s his name?”
Nobody knows.
“What’s going on?” Mistress Sylvia shouts from below.
The clamor makes me dizzy. I need to be alone. I need to think.
*
After the riot in Oakland, I carried the young woman, who was bleeding from the leg, back to my apartment. Emily helped me set her down on the couch.
My jeans hung loose because I’d wrapped my belt around the girl’s leg in an attempt to stem the blood loss.
“Can you hear me?” Emily asked the woman, and pulled up the trouser leg to reveal the wound. She grimaced and turned to me. “You may have saved her life, you know.”
“Well, don’t jinx her,” I say without humor, and then after a pause, “There are no ambulances now. Do you think the cops would have just left her there?”
“We both know the answer to that.”
At that moment, the police were mopping up the stragglers left on the university campus and then moving on to South Oakland and across into Southside. The next day, Emily and I had our suspicion confirmed. The police were far too busy to help the wounded or move the dead. They should have removed and burned the bodies because they were a plague containment issue, but the morning news informed us that, by now, containing the plague was a futile effort and a waste of valuable resources.
When the wounded woman regained consciousness, she told us that her name was Laura. We cared for her through the evening, treated her wound, and brought her food.
In the early hours of the next day, Laura’s coughing woke us both.
“She’s caught it?” Emily asked in a whisper. “G9?”
“Then she’s got to go,” I replied.
After a false start, I mustered the courage to confront Laura with our ultimatum. I knelt down next to her in the darkness of the studio. I held a moist t-shirt over my mouth and nose and glanced back at Emily, who lay in the bed covering her own face with a wet towel. She nodded at me and I turned again to speak to the worried girl.
“If you’re infected — then you can’t stay.” I said through the wet fabric.
“But—”
“There’s no cure. We all know that. And we can’t run the risk of letting you infect us. So you can’t stay. You have to leave.”
Laura rolled on her back and craned her neck to look towards the window. Snow fell outside. “Can’t it wait until tomorrow?” she asked. “At least until the snow stops.”
I sighed and looked towards Emily again. She shuffled as if she was about to get up and talk to Laura herself. We couldn’t afford a discussion on the matter. “No, it has to be now. You have to leave now.”
Emily developed symptoms of the G9 virus the next afternoon.
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Continues here.
Monday, May 25, 2009
In a Similar Vein: Ash and Zabe
Technological wizardry (well, checking where visitors come from) just brought another online novel, Ash and Zabe, to my attention. I'm afraid I couldn't find the author's name anywhere so can't credit anyone, but the novel itself is a really solid piece of writing. What immediately struck me was the excellent dialogue -- it grabs you by the throat so you just can't stop reading. What's more, the idea behind the story is totally bizarre, so I'm fascinated to see what comes next.
I heartily recommend to any fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and all this awesome apocalyptic type stuff.
Check it out here.
I heartily recommend to any fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and all this awesome apocalyptic type stuff.
Check it out here.
Saturday, May 23, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 1
This is the Second part of A Pittsburgh Storm. If you're new here, you should start at Part 1, Chapter 1. This post also provides some valuable information to help the newcomer find their bearings.
The next chapter will be posted on Wednesday, May 27th. Please email me with your comments.
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Part Two
Mecca, Southside
1
In the middle of Pittsburgh’s Southside, these people had created a fortress. The man who yelled at us from the window comes down to lead us though the building’s inconspicuous entrance. He introduces himself, with a beaming smile, as Nicolas, a proud Honduran, and he explains how overjoyed he is to meet us. He accompanies everything he says with an elaborate hand gesture or exaggerated expression. I immediately like his animated character.
“Our community here just gets bigger and bigger,” he says, smiling. “I was one of the originals, and,” he sticks him thumb to his chest, “it was my idea to get those fireworks. You guys,” he pauses for our full attention, “this place is going to save us.”
“Save us?” Hank asks.
“Yeah, all of us! Humankind is close to being wiped out completely and forever.” Nicolas makes a gesture, with the tips of his index finger and thumb held near to each other, to mean very close. “You’ve noticed right?” and he indicates the space around us.
“Yeah. There are no women.”
“Exactly!” We follow Nicolas up the staircase, two, three floors. We’re lost, confused, in a daze. “We all noticed too. No women. Our group was five men strong before we realized. Our boy-gang felt natural enough for us not to realize for a while. One of us, Sal, said how he ‘would kill to have a woman’. Those are the words he used. And then, wow, hang on, where are the women?
“We were hiding out over in Southside works — we had a nice little apartment over there — and we headed into East Carson to do some looting. We couldn’t believe out luck, man.”
We take a right and head down a long corridor that goes through several adjoining buildings. The place is comfortable enough; clean at least. We see other men in various rooms and more lounging around down passageways. Most nod in greeting towards our bewildered faces. I can barely handle all of this new information.
“We were all going mad. Our group was tearing at the seams. Two weeks of hell, and we had this terrible realization. ‘What’s a world with no women?’ It’s a short-lived one, that’s what. There was no point anymore. We were filling our days with meaningless labor just so we could forget the futility of it all.”
“Yeah, well, we can sympathize with that,” Hank intersects.
“But then we discovered we were wrong,” Nicolas continues. “We were very, very wrong.”
The long corridor ends at a wide blue door.
“My friends and I, we were looting on East Carson, at a drug store, the five of us,” he knocks on the door, “when we found Mistress Sylvia.”
Somebody opens the door from the other side and a head appears in the gap, a young man with a balding skull.
“No weapons, man,” Nicolas says. “They’re good.” In fact, James has a handgun in his jacket, Hank has a rifle poking out the top of his bag, and I have a crowbar in my satchel.
The balding man hums and looks at us with suspicion. “OK,” he nods and opens the door to reveal a plush living room. Mismatched couches sit along all sides of the deep red walls. A genuine Warhol depicting Elvis Presley (stolen from the museum in the Northside, I presume) hangs large and proud on the wall opposite. Beneath the painting, seated in a large armchair, sits the voluptuous Mistress Sylvia.
“Gentlemen,” she says with delight and a beaming smile. My mouth is gaped open. “Please, take a seat.”
*
In due course, Sylvia invites Hank, James, and I to stay in “Mecca” for as long as we see fit. That is, provided we help with the community’s upkeep and follow Mistress Sylvia’s rules for living.
These rules are simple enough: do what Mistress Sylvia says; be polite to those around you; don’t eat all the food; respect one another’s privacy; complete the tasks assigned to you; and so on. Because Mistress Sylvia is our only hope for the continuation of mankind, so far, she is in absolute charge of absolutely everything. Thus, she is Mistress Sylvia, and that, her assistant tells us, is something we must remember.
“In Mecca, we now have thirty men. We stockpile food and water, search for other survivors, and we’re in the process of getting an electrical generator up and running. Eventually, right here, this is where civilization is going to start anew. Out the window there,” she points to the desolation, “that is the enemy. And we’re going to win.”
For days Hank, James, and I, had been slipping into a silent depression with the prospect of what could have lain ahead. Now that we have seen Mistress Sylvia, we’re ecstatic in our sense of relief and this immediate joy keeps any cynicism away. There is no thought of questioning Mistress Sylvia’s self-imposed rulership of this new society. Why would there be? After weeks of shit, this is fucking fantastic. There’s a smile about a mile wide slapped across my face.
“In the Mecca enclave, we have space to fit fifty members, at four or so per room. You have to do your part — a fair bit of labor is required — building, salvaging, and restoring. When the weather improves and we’ve grown in number, we’re going to use parkland and gardens for farming. We’re also going to establish some radio broadcasts, once the generators are online. Many of the generators we expected to find disappeared during The Fall, but we’ve acquired one so far and it’s in the process of repair. You’ll see that things are looking up!”
I soon learn that the phrase “The Fall” is a talisman to those in Mecca. “The Fall” is the enemy they are conquering and overcoming, and also their biggest fear — the fear that they could again slip from this precarious grasp on civilization. When Mistress Sylvia says the phrase, her voice deepens and her brow creases. The Fall.
“I do hope you’ll decide to stay; we need all the help we can get. As a gesture of our hospitality, you can all relax for this afternoon. We’ll arrange a room for you and you’re welcome to join the rest us for dinner in the recreation room. As well as you three, we gained a further four members this morning, all counted, and this makes today our most successful day so far. Tell me, was it the fireworks?”
“Yeah,” Hank blurts out on our uncomfortable, confused, and delighted behalf, “Yeah, it was the fireworks. We were holed up in Lawrenceville.”
“Really?” Mistress Sylvia is genuinely interested. “What condition is that neighborhood in? We’ve been focusing on Southside, dipping into Oakland and Downtown a little—” I give myself a mental kick — if I’d stayed in Oakland only a short while longer, I may have found these people days ago and saved myself so much difficulty. “Of course all three areas are trashed, but at least there’s a lot to pick from the wreckage.” She looks to Hank, waiting for his response.
“Well, only the central part is significantly damaged. Liberty is totally ruined,” he says. “We were staying at a place that belonged to James’ family,” James shuffles when Hank gestures towards him, “and out in the residential parts, things are untouched. That is, I mean, relatively untouched, at least.”
“That’s very good news. Any indication that The Fall left something intact is good news.” She pauses and smiles. Behind us, the balding doorkeeper is crossing the room. “Now, gentlemen, if you don’t object, I must return to things.” I hadn’t noticed that she’d been doing anything before we walked in. “Nicolas will show you around Mecca and then to your rooms. Am I correct, Nicolas?” He nods. “I’m sure we’ll be able to catch up later.” And on that note, Mistress Sylvia smiles and turns to the balding man who has reopened the door for our exit.
As we leave, the balding man picks up a clipboard and goes to sit on the couch closest to the matriarch.
Nicolas ushers us out of Mistress Sylvia’s office. The woman, brushing us off with such promptness, has left us stunned, but we are soon led up yet another flight of stairs, at the base of which Nicolas pauses to point along a corridor. “Down there you’ll find a kitchen and a common room which doubles as a dining room — the Mistress calls it both a recreation room and a mess hall. Up here is your room.” At the summit of the stairwell, he takes us to another corridor. “The three of you will be sharing,” he says with no room for dispute.
Ahead of us, there’s an old man checking the wiring on some ceiling lights, no doubt for when somebody else has repaired the generator. In the meantime, the corridor is dark, even during the day. A small window facing into an alleyway provides the only illumination. Of course the building is freezing. I can see my own breath. We pass three doors and Nicolas stops to open one, pointing inside.
“There are bed sheets ready for you but that’s about it. I’m sorry about that but we’re still not fully settled.” He smiles at us again, genuinely pained, but still cheerful through it all. “Now, there’s no running water here so when you go to the bathroom drop the bucket of rainwater down afterwards. Then refill the bucket from the tank in the courtyard and put it back. Is that cool, guys?” He looks at me and his smile falters. Presumably, I have the face of a man who would leave a big stinking shit to fester in the toilet bowl.
“Yeah, sure,” I say in my defense.
Nicolas leaves Hank, James, and I in the bedroom and informs us that he will see us later. Three beds are crowded in the small space, with two of them arranged as a bunk bed. There are indeed bed sheets, as Nicolas promised, but little else. We sit on the beds and look at each other, Hank up on the top bunk, James beneath him, and myself opposite. After a few moments alone, after the rush of new things, our initial excitement at the discovery of a woman is replaced with anxiety. We have few of our belongings with us, so we feel vulnerable. We’re excited to be here, now there’s hope, but we know we’d be more comfortable in out own little fortress on the other side of the river.
Back when we thought there were no women left, at least we were reassured that our demise would be simple, if nothing else. Now we have to battle for survival. And that’s a daunting task.
I show an awkward smile to Hank, then James, and they reciprocate.
“So there’s hope,” James says.
“Yeah, it’s a relief to have something,” Hank replies.
“You’re anxious about her?”
“I’m anxious about a lot of things.”
Now that we’ve joined a large group of strangers, we feel more alone than ever. It’s like the paradox of being alone in a city of millions. Of standing on the subway and looking at the floor or in a newspaper, because you’re so alone when there are so many people in your space. You may remain ignorant to how alone you are in your head, until you’re so utterly surrounded by unfamiliar faces.
The sound of hammering elsewhere in the building breaks the silence.
“Guys,” Hank ushers James and I towards him. I’m surprised to see his brow sweating. “Let’s not tell these people about the snowmobile, huh? At least for now. Let’s not put all of our eggs in one basket.”
James and I nod with him. He’s right, I guess, and as the oldest of our trio, we respect his opinion.
“Well, I’m going to try to get some sleep,” Hank says. He rolls onto his belly, fully clothed, and pulls the blanket over his head.
James and I look to each other and James shrugs, smiling. Instead of his usual worried, nervous smiles, this time he has a genuine humor.
I haven’t seen a smile like that from him in days.
The next chapter will be posted on Wednesday, May 27th. Please email me with your comments.
-------
Part Two
Mecca, Southside
1
In the middle of Pittsburgh’s Southside, these people had created a fortress. The man who yelled at us from the window comes down to lead us though the building’s inconspicuous entrance. He introduces himself, with a beaming smile, as Nicolas, a proud Honduran, and he explains how overjoyed he is to meet us. He accompanies everything he says with an elaborate hand gesture or exaggerated expression. I immediately like his animated character.
“Our community here just gets bigger and bigger,” he says, smiling. “I was one of the originals, and,” he sticks him thumb to his chest, “it was my idea to get those fireworks. You guys,” he pauses for our full attention, “this place is going to save us.”
“Save us?” Hank asks.
“Yeah, all of us! Humankind is close to being wiped out completely and forever.” Nicolas makes a gesture, with the tips of his index finger and thumb held near to each other, to mean very close. “You’ve noticed right?” and he indicates the space around us.
“Yeah. There are no women.”
“Exactly!” We follow Nicolas up the staircase, two, three floors. We’re lost, confused, in a daze. “We all noticed too. No women. Our group was five men strong before we realized. Our boy-gang felt natural enough for us not to realize for a while. One of us, Sal, said how he ‘would kill to have a woman’. Those are the words he used. And then, wow, hang on, where are the women?
“We were hiding out over in Southside works — we had a nice little apartment over there — and we headed into East Carson to do some looting. We couldn’t believe out luck, man.”
We take a right and head down a long corridor that goes through several adjoining buildings. The place is comfortable enough; clean at least. We see other men in various rooms and more lounging around down passageways. Most nod in greeting towards our bewildered faces. I can barely handle all of this new information.
“We were all going mad. Our group was tearing at the seams. Two weeks of hell, and we had this terrible realization. ‘What’s a world with no women?’ It’s a short-lived one, that’s what. There was no point anymore. We were filling our days with meaningless labor just so we could forget the futility of it all.”
“Yeah, well, we can sympathize with that,” Hank intersects.
“But then we discovered we were wrong,” Nicolas continues. “We were very, very wrong.”
The long corridor ends at a wide blue door.
“My friends and I, we were looting on East Carson, at a drug store, the five of us,” he knocks on the door, “when we found Mistress Sylvia.”
Somebody opens the door from the other side and a head appears in the gap, a young man with a balding skull.
“No weapons, man,” Nicolas says. “They’re good.” In fact, James has a handgun in his jacket, Hank has a rifle poking out the top of his bag, and I have a crowbar in my satchel.
The balding man hums and looks at us with suspicion. “OK,” he nods and opens the door to reveal a plush living room. Mismatched couches sit along all sides of the deep red walls. A genuine Warhol depicting Elvis Presley (stolen from the museum in the Northside, I presume) hangs large and proud on the wall opposite. Beneath the painting, seated in a large armchair, sits the voluptuous Mistress Sylvia.
“Gentlemen,” she says with delight and a beaming smile. My mouth is gaped open. “Please, take a seat.”
*
In due course, Sylvia invites Hank, James, and I to stay in “Mecca” for as long as we see fit. That is, provided we help with the community’s upkeep and follow Mistress Sylvia’s rules for living.
These rules are simple enough: do what Mistress Sylvia says; be polite to those around you; don’t eat all the food; respect one another’s privacy; complete the tasks assigned to you; and so on. Because Mistress Sylvia is our only hope for the continuation of mankind, so far, she is in absolute charge of absolutely everything. Thus, she is Mistress Sylvia, and that, her assistant tells us, is something we must remember.
“In Mecca, we now have thirty men. We stockpile food and water, search for other survivors, and we’re in the process of getting an electrical generator up and running. Eventually, right here, this is where civilization is going to start anew. Out the window there,” she points to the desolation, “that is the enemy. And we’re going to win.”
For days Hank, James, and I, had been slipping into a silent depression with the prospect of what could have lain ahead. Now that we have seen Mistress Sylvia, we’re ecstatic in our sense of relief and this immediate joy keeps any cynicism away. There is no thought of questioning Mistress Sylvia’s self-imposed rulership of this new society. Why would there be? After weeks of shit, this is fucking fantastic. There’s a smile about a mile wide slapped across my face.
“In the Mecca enclave, we have space to fit fifty members, at four or so per room. You have to do your part — a fair bit of labor is required — building, salvaging, and restoring. When the weather improves and we’ve grown in number, we’re going to use parkland and gardens for farming. We’re also going to establish some radio broadcasts, once the generators are online. Many of the generators we expected to find disappeared during The Fall, but we’ve acquired one so far and it’s in the process of repair. You’ll see that things are looking up!”
I soon learn that the phrase “The Fall” is a talisman to those in Mecca. “The Fall” is the enemy they are conquering and overcoming, and also their biggest fear — the fear that they could again slip from this precarious grasp on civilization. When Mistress Sylvia says the phrase, her voice deepens and her brow creases. The Fall.
“I do hope you’ll decide to stay; we need all the help we can get. As a gesture of our hospitality, you can all relax for this afternoon. We’ll arrange a room for you and you’re welcome to join the rest us for dinner in the recreation room. As well as you three, we gained a further four members this morning, all counted, and this makes today our most successful day so far. Tell me, was it the fireworks?”
“Yeah,” Hank blurts out on our uncomfortable, confused, and delighted behalf, “Yeah, it was the fireworks. We were holed up in Lawrenceville.”
“Really?” Mistress Sylvia is genuinely interested. “What condition is that neighborhood in? We’ve been focusing on Southside, dipping into Oakland and Downtown a little—” I give myself a mental kick — if I’d stayed in Oakland only a short while longer, I may have found these people days ago and saved myself so much difficulty. “Of course all three areas are trashed, but at least there’s a lot to pick from the wreckage.” She looks to Hank, waiting for his response.
“Well, only the central part is significantly damaged. Liberty is totally ruined,” he says. “We were staying at a place that belonged to James’ family,” James shuffles when Hank gestures towards him, “and out in the residential parts, things are untouched. That is, I mean, relatively untouched, at least.”
“That’s very good news. Any indication that The Fall left something intact is good news.” She pauses and smiles. Behind us, the balding doorkeeper is crossing the room. “Now, gentlemen, if you don’t object, I must return to things.” I hadn’t noticed that she’d been doing anything before we walked in. “Nicolas will show you around Mecca and then to your rooms. Am I correct, Nicolas?” He nods. “I’m sure we’ll be able to catch up later.” And on that note, Mistress Sylvia smiles and turns to the balding man who has reopened the door for our exit.
As we leave, the balding man picks up a clipboard and goes to sit on the couch closest to the matriarch.
Nicolas ushers us out of Mistress Sylvia’s office. The woman, brushing us off with such promptness, has left us stunned, but we are soon led up yet another flight of stairs, at the base of which Nicolas pauses to point along a corridor. “Down there you’ll find a kitchen and a common room which doubles as a dining room — the Mistress calls it both a recreation room and a mess hall. Up here is your room.” At the summit of the stairwell, he takes us to another corridor. “The three of you will be sharing,” he says with no room for dispute.
Ahead of us, there’s an old man checking the wiring on some ceiling lights, no doubt for when somebody else has repaired the generator. In the meantime, the corridor is dark, even during the day. A small window facing into an alleyway provides the only illumination. Of course the building is freezing. I can see my own breath. We pass three doors and Nicolas stops to open one, pointing inside.
“There are bed sheets ready for you but that’s about it. I’m sorry about that but we’re still not fully settled.” He smiles at us again, genuinely pained, but still cheerful through it all. “Now, there’s no running water here so when you go to the bathroom drop the bucket of rainwater down afterwards. Then refill the bucket from the tank in the courtyard and put it back. Is that cool, guys?” He looks at me and his smile falters. Presumably, I have the face of a man who would leave a big stinking shit to fester in the toilet bowl.
“Yeah, sure,” I say in my defense.
Nicolas leaves Hank, James, and I in the bedroom and informs us that he will see us later. Three beds are crowded in the small space, with two of them arranged as a bunk bed. There are indeed bed sheets, as Nicolas promised, but little else. We sit on the beds and look at each other, Hank up on the top bunk, James beneath him, and myself opposite. After a few moments alone, after the rush of new things, our initial excitement at the discovery of a woman is replaced with anxiety. We have few of our belongings with us, so we feel vulnerable. We’re excited to be here, now there’s hope, but we know we’d be more comfortable in out own little fortress on the other side of the river.
Back when we thought there were no women left, at least we were reassured that our demise would be simple, if nothing else. Now we have to battle for survival. And that’s a daunting task.
I show an awkward smile to Hank, then James, and they reciprocate.
“So there’s hope,” James says.
“Yeah, it’s a relief to have something,” Hank replies.
“You’re anxious about her?”
“I’m anxious about a lot of things.”
Now that we’ve joined a large group of strangers, we feel more alone than ever. It’s like the paradox of being alone in a city of millions. Of standing on the subway and looking at the floor or in a newspaper, because you’re so alone when there are so many people in your space. You may remain ignorant to how alone you are in your head, until you’re so utterly surrounded by unfamiliar faces.
The sound of hammering elsewhere in the building breaks the silence.
“Guys,” Hank ushers James and I towards him. I’m surprised to see his brow sweating. “Let’s not tell these people about the snowmobile, huh? At least for now. Let’s not put all of our eggs in one basket.”
James and I nod with him. He’s right, I guess, and as the oldest of our trio, we respect his opinion.
“Well, I’m going to try to get some sleep,” Hank says. He rolls onto his belly, fully clothed, and pulls the blanket over his head.
James and I look to each other and James shrugs, smiling. Instead of his usual worried, nervous smiles, this time he has a genuine humor.
I haven’t seen a smile like that from him in days.
The Story so Far
This past month, I've been serializing my first novel, A Pittsburgh Storm, for free, right here. Today, I will be posting the first chapter of the second part of the book. Part 1 is 39 pages long (standard trade paperback), and if you're new to this website, you should really start reading it from here.
So far, I've received some great reviews, some really encouraging comments, and some valuable criticism. It's those comments which really make this endeavour worthwhile (and the tiny trickle of cash from Lulu.com), so please do continue to send comments and opinions, and tell all your friends.
So far, you can follow updates here with the RSS feed. I'm also available on Twitter and Authonomy, if your interested in such things. Of course, you can find the entire book on Lulu too, and that way you don't have to wait to find out what happens next. (EDIT: Now Smashwords also hosts the book, if you want a copy that will work on your ebook reader).
On a final note, I want to set up a link exchange with other blogs or websites concerned with e-publishing and particularly online science-fiction. Please drop me a line if you feel you might qualify.
Part 2 is scheduled to upload at 4pm, GMT. Enjoy!
Dave
So far, I've received some great reviews, some really encouraging comments, and some valuable criticism. It's those comments which really make this endeavour worthwhile (and the tiny trickle of cash from Lulu.com), so please do continue to send comments and opinions, and tell all your friends.
So far, you can follow updates here with the RSS feed. I'm also available on Twitter and Authonomy, if your interested in such things. Of course, you can find the entire book on Lulu too, and that way you don't have to wait to find out what happens next. (EDIT: Now Smashwords also hosts the book, if you want a copy that will work on your ebook reader).
On a final note, I want to set up a link exchange with other blogs or websites concerned with e-publishing and particularly online science-fiction. Please drop me a line if you feel you might qualify.
Part 2 is scheduled to upload at 4pm, GMT. Enjoy!
Dave
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Part 1, Chapter 6
Quick update and a short chapter. This is the last chapter in Part 1. I'll begin posting Part 2 on Saturday, May 23rd. Any comments? Drop me an email. Enjoy.
---------
6
The sun rises again and Hank, James, and I sit on the porch to eat breakfast. We’ve been eating bacon sandwiches for the past three days. Prior to meeting James and I, Hank found four packets of bacon and kept them chilled outside his apartment window, in a Tupperware box. This bacon, with stale, buttered bread and a protein bar, forms our morning breakfast routine. We eat on the porch if the weather isn’t windy, discussing our theories on the G9 plague, and then telling old stories to cheer each other up.
After the fourth day of bacon and protein bars, the morning after witnessing the fireworks, the three of us make our trip to the Southside, sat in a row along Hank’s snowmobile. Ben, the dog, stays at home again.
On a clear day, the drive would take no more than fifteen minutes, but on a snowmobile, with the terrible weather and piles of junk cluttering the streets, we are still ambling along an hour later. When we arrive at the Birmingham Bridge, the remains of a police roadblock means abandoned cars tail back on both lanes, across most of the bridge’s span. Hundred’s of vehicles sit empty and buried in the snow, stretching all the way from Forbes, where Soho, Oakland, and the Hill District join, to East Carson Street and beyond.
We have no choice but to leave the snowmobile behind the impossible cluster of cars, motorbikes, SUVs, and trucks, and climb on foot through the assemblage of dead steel. Southside is only a few hundred meters away, where it stretches for several miles along the river to the west until it joins the upscale Station Square.
Anxiety permeates the cold air. The three of us came to the consensus that the fireworks were an attempt at communication, but we’re nervous about what we may find. The nervous attitude makes the Birmingham Bridge appear to stretch for miles – filled with millions of anxious footsteps. We walk past what looks like a military transport vehicle with its canvas covering torn off. Black birds perch on the vehicle’s frame and look down upon us. The birds shuffle as we pass and bits of snow fall from their feet. They’re black and silent.
None of us have been to the Southside in weeks and the level of destruction it has endured comes as a shock. This place was once full of life. Now buildings are burnt out and the streets are trashed. We see a body hanging from a lamppost, with a noose around its neck. The corpse is white from the cold and snow gathers on its head and shoulders. Its eyes are missing. I feel ill. James turns away, hunches over, and pukes.
“What the fuck happened?” Hank asks.
“Who could do a thing like this?”
James continues to gag while Hank silently stares at the body. A minute passes and James stops retching, stoops and looks at the vomit he’s produced. No one utters a word. Then one of the silent black birds flies over our heads, lands on the body’s shoulder, shuffles around, and pecks at the frozen flesh on the neck.
“You fucker!” Hank screams, and his face turns beetroot red. He bends over, picks up a ceramic bowl that lays half buried at his feet, and throws it, intending anger, but finds, instead, a gesture of impotence. The bowl misses and smashes on the ground below while the bird watches, ever silent. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the creature flaps its wings and takes to the sky again. As the weight shifts, the body rocks back and forth on its noose. These days, even the dead have no dignity. The body on the plaza opposite my former apartment stands as further testament to that simple fact.
“Let’s go,” Hank says with control as he walks past the body, further into the Southside. I follow, after a brief pause, and James trails farther behind me.
We pass clothes stores, drug stores, and tobacconists, all destroyed. Bus stops are smashed up and bins emptied with their contents scattered across the road, which leaves glassy shards concealed beneath the snow. We see the occasional body, but none as gruesome as the first.
After a mile of walking, with no warning, a man leans out of a window above an upscale bar and yells at us. “Hey! Hey, over here!”
We all jump.
“You’re the guy firing off the fireworks?” Hank yells.
The stranger beams a broad smile. “That’s right. Welcome to Mecca!”
----------
Part 2 starts here.
---------
6
The sun rises again and Hank, James, and I sit on the porch to eat breakfast. We’ve been eating bacon sandwiches for the past three days. Prior to meeting James and I, Hank found four packets of bacon and kept them chilled outside his apartment window, in a Tupperware box. This bacon, with stale, buttered bread and a protein bar, forms our morning breakfast routine. We eat on the porch if the weather isn’t windy, discussing our theories on the G9 plague, and then telling old stories to cheer each other up.
After the fourth day of bacon and protein bars, the morning after witnessing the fireworks, the three of us make our trip to the Southside, sat in a row along Hank’s snowmobile. Ben, the dog, stays at home again.
On a clear day, the drive would take no more than fifteen minutes, but on a snowmobile, with the terrible weather and piles of junk cluttering the streets, we are still ambling along an hour later. When we arrive at the Birmingham Bridge, the remains of a police roadblock means abandoned cars tail back on both lanes, across most of the bridge’s span. Hundred’s of vehicles sit empty and buried in the snow, stretching all the way from Forbes, where Soho, Oakland, and the Hill District join, to East Carson Street and beyond.
We have no choice but to leave the snowmobile behind the impossible cluster of cars, motorbikes, SUVs, and trucks, and climb on foot through the assemblage of dead steel. Southside is only a few hundred meters away, where it stretches for several miles along the river to the west until it joins the upscale Station Square.
Anxiety permeates the cold air. The three of us came to the consensus that the fireworks were an attempt at communication, but we’re nervous about what we may find. The nervous attitude makes the Birmingham Bridge appear to stretch for miles – filled with millions of anxious footsteps. We walk past what looks like a military transport vehicle with its canvas covering torn off. Black birds perch on the vehicle’s frame and look down upon us. The birds shuffle as we pass and bits of snow fall from their feet. They’re black and silent.
None of us have been to the Southside in weeks and the level of destruction it has endured comes as a shock. This place was once full of life. Now buildings are burnt out and the streets are trashed. We see a body hanging from a lamppost, with a noose around its neck. The corpse is white from the cold and snow gathers on its head and shoulders. Its eyes are missing. I feel ill. James turns away, hunches over, and pukes.
“What the fuck happened?” Hank asks.
“Who could do a thing like this?”
James continues to gag while Hank silently stares at the body. A minute passes and James stops retching, stoops and looks at the vomit he’s produced. No one utters a word. Then one of the silent black birds flies over our heads, lands on the body’s shoulder, shuffles around, and pecks at the frozen flesh on the neck.
“You fucker!” Hank screams, and his face turns beetroot red. He bends over, picks up a ceramic bowl that lays half buried at his feet, and throws it, intending anger, but finds, instead, a gesture of impotence. The bowl misses and smashes on the ground below while the bird watches, ever silent. Then, as quickly as it had appeared, the creature flaps its wings and takes to the sky again. As the weight shifts, the body rocks back and forth on its noose. These days, even the dead have no dignity. The body on the plaza opposite my former apartment stands as further testament to that simple fact.
“Let’s go,” Hank says with control as he walks past the body, further into the Southside. I follow, after a brief pause, and James trails farther behind me.
We pass clothes stores, drug stores, and tobacconists, all destroyed. Bus stops are smashed up and bins emptied with their contents scattered across the road, which leaves glassy shards concealed beneath the snow. We see the occasional body, but none as gruesome as the first.
After a mile of walking, with no warning, a man leans out of a window above an upscale bar and yells at us. “Hey! Hey, over here!”
We all jump.
“You’re the guy firing off the fireworks?” Hank yells.
The stranger beams a broad smile. “That’s right. Welcome to Mecca!”
----------
Part 2 starts here.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Authonomy
You can now find A Pittsburgh Storm on Authonomy -- HarperCollins' system for sorting through manuscript submissions. It's a pretty lively community with some good author forums. I recommend you check it out.
You can find A Pittsburgh Storm here -- you can add it to your favourites, make some comments, and get it under the noses of publishers.
Dave
You can find A Pittsburgh Storm here -- you can add it to your favourites, make some comments, and get it under the noses of publishers.
Dave
Friday, May 15, 2009
Part 1, Chapter 5
5
The sun rises and sets and rises and sets and on the third night we hear fireworks again. The three of us assemble on the front porch to watch the yellows, oranges, reds, purples, and blues billow across the sky in ever more elaborate patterns, mixing, popping, crackling, burning out, and being renewed. The whole vision diffused through the light spatter of snowflake and clouds of gunpowder smoke. There are hundreds of fireworks, probably brought from Ohio or stolen from the sport stadiums.
“Somebody trying to get our attention,” I announce.
“That seems the obvious explanation,” Hank concurs.
Over the past two days, James has become increasingly insular. There are plenty of obvious reasons why this has happened. The past few days of scarce activity has left too much time to muse upon our dire situation. Arriving at the understanding that everyone you have ever known may well be dead is enough to fuck anybody up. Furthermore, Hank’s theory of the plague’s misogynistic quality hasn’t helped anybody’s emotional state. But I don’t know why this would have affected James more visibly than Hank and I. When I ask James how he’s feeling, I am as likely to get an unconcerned response as I am to get a cheerful or even angry one.
So James remains quiet, staring at the explosions in the sky.
I break the long silence. “Well it’s on the Southside” — a shopping and cultural district stretching a few miles along the Monongahela River — “how about we head down there tomorrow?”
“We’ve got nothing to lose,” Hank replies.
---------
Chapter 6, here.
The sun rises and sets and rises and sets and on the third night we hear fireworks again. The three of us assemble on the front porch to watch the yellows, oranges, reds, purples, and blues billow across the sky in ever more elaborate patterns, mixing, popping, crackling, burning out, and being renewed. The whole vision diffused through the light spatter of snowflake and clouds of gunpowder smoke. There are hundreds of fireworks, probably brought from Ohio or stolen from the sport stadiums.
“Somebody trying to get our attention,” I announce.
“That seems the obvious explanation,” Hank concurs.
Over the past two days, James has become increasingly insular. There are plenty of obvious reasons why this has happened. The past few days of scarce activity has left too much time to muse upon our dire situation. Arriving at the understanding that everyone you have ever known may well be dead is enough to fuck anybody up. Furthermore, Hank’s theory of the plague’s misogynistic quality hasn’t helped anybody’s emotional state. But I don’t know why this would have affected James more visibly than Hank and I. When I ask James how he’s feeling, I am as likely to get an unconcerned response as I am to get a cheerful or even angry one.
So James remains quiet, staring at the explosions in the sky.
I break the long silence. “Well it’s on the Southside” — a shopping and cultural district stretching a few miles along the Monongahela River — “how about we head down there tomorrow?”
“We’ve got nothing to lose,” Hank replies.
---------
Chapter 6, here.
Monday, May 11, 2009
Part 1, Chapter 4
Here's Chapter 4, where I start to introduce some new elements into the mix. The subsequent two chapters are pretty short (expect Chapter 5 on April 15th and Chapter 6 on April 19th) and spin the narrative off on a whole new direction before the beginning of Part 2. Stay tuned for that.
Use the menu on the right to navigate to wherever you are. As always, the whole thing starts at Chapter 1, here.
I've had some great plugs this week, and I love it when people promote my work, so please do that more! Tell all your friends and stick this on Digg and Reddit and all that mumbo-jumbo. Comments and constructive criticism also makes me feel fuzzy inside.
(so would an publisher who wants to give me cash)
Much love,
Dave
---------
4
This morning’s intrusion into the Spellman house has simultaneously renewed my feelings of sickening loss and given me a strange hunger for voyeuristic intrusion. Although looking through the remnants of the old lives is saddening, I want more. I lose myself the masochistic pleasure of searching through the homes, reconstructing in my mind the lives of those who once inhabited the buildings. The ramifications of the G9 plague and the deaths of billions are so enormous that anything other than an escape through fantasy is too much for the mind to cope with. So I do that. I escape through fantasy. I recreate the lives of those who once lived in these homes. I watch my fabrications move around the empty spaces and I pretend nothing has happened. I’m aware that I’m creating fictions — this understanding never leaves my mind — and I’m aware that I need to do this. I’m still sane — I’m just trying to cope.
A forty-minute walk from James’ place is a large house, better described as a manor, which I recall from riding the bus between Oakland and Squirrel Hill. The house was always in a poor condition, with vines creeping up its walls and over its dusty windows, and there’s no guarantee of valuable contents, but the home has fostered a place in my imagination. It’s as good a reason as any other, so with time to kill, I decide to make the trip there.
As I stroll into the driveway, having not seen a soul on the journey, I immediately notice that looters have targeted the home. They’ve smashed all of the bay windows at the front of the building. The building’s main entrance is ajar and I approach it along the gravel driveway, which crunches underfoot, softly muted by a thick layer of snow. In the lobby, old smashed vinyl records and broken photo frames cover the ground. I climb over an upturned couch blocking the door into the kitchen.
In the kitchen, the cupboards are open and their contents spilled on the floor: pots, pans, plates, cutlery, and food. I pick up a box of cheese-flavored biscuits, find it empty, and throw it back to the ground where it clatters onto some silverware. The rear door is open and the wind has blown several feet of snow into the kitchen. There are no footprints in it, so I must be the first person to visit this place in a while.
While I gaze at the destruction around the home, the cold turns my breath into a specter that floats ahead of me. The ghostly image of the otherwise invisible breath leads me to imagine the family who perhaps lived here: mom, dad, and three children in this enormous expanse of a home. Mom pours orange juice and coffee and serves cereal to dad who fastens his tie, ready for a day at the office. The kids scutter about, collecting their lunches, preparing for school. Sometimes mom and dad have parties here, and where I’m standing crowds of life would have milled around, telling stories, drinking their cocktails, serving up another martini, another rum and coke, another Campari and orange. Then a week, maybe ten days ago, mom, dad, and three children caught G9. They suffered for up to three days in a serious condition as the breathing difficulties and heart problems kicked in. The family died soon after and their home, built with years of hard work and care in equal measures, struggling under its old age, is reduced to this present shambles in a matter of days, left in the hands of those few strangers who remain clinging to the threads of life.
It shocks me how suddenly this home became another ambiguous place. I’m unnerved, so I can’t bring myself to look upstairs — the voyeuristic pleasure has left me. Instead of pushing into the interior, I leave through the kitchen door, into the back garden, and down the side of the house, climbing over a snow-buried toy truck.
The air is clear from snowfall, so I take my time walking back to James’ house, kicking up the powder on the sidewalk in weak swishes.
*
Do you know that feeling of being watched? It only manifests itself when the actual chances of being watched are very low. Perhaps the feeling of being watched is only a reaction to how uncomfortable it is for humans, as social animals, to be alone. If there were a genuine potential for people to be looking out of each window on this quiet residential street, I would have no such paranoia. It’s a bizarre feeling, this feeling of a total absence. It’s the feeling of every hair on the back of your neck standing to attention because this is the uncanny in its most distilled of forms.
The city has forgotten I exist. It will always be here, regardless of my presence — it will always stand over me, but it will always be oblivious. A few years ago, in my own creative writing, I was obsessed with the concept how the city functioned as if it were alive — constructed by man, but then given the push and left to roll upon its own steam. In my first year of university, to the neglect of class work, I used to churn out short stories — maybe five a month. They were fine in terms of quality and a few were published in small press journals, but when I found myself with a Grade Point Average of 2.3 by the end of the year and faced the prospect of resitting examinations, I left the stories on my mind’s backburner, and buckled down to work. I never returned to the stories, but they still stick in my mind. I wrote one of the stories after visiting a student photography show that depicted a city, buzzing with vibrancy and life, and lighting up the otherwise cold night. The photographer intended these images to be a celebration of the awesome power of the city, but when I looked at them, rather than seeing vibrancy and fun, I saw people who looked small, ineffectual, and trodden on. To the photographer, the city was a spectacular neon show, but in my eyes, the city was a machine, and I was more interested in the fuel that kept it alive: the people who toiled there every day. Yes, the machine was magnificent, but only at the price of the individual.
In my story, the city literally consumed its inhabitants in its insatiable hunger for growth. The individuals residing in the city’s mechanism were shadows, drowned out by streetlights, headlamps, and neon. Did you ever see those photos of Hiroshima after the A-Bombs were dropped? Not the photos of the mushroom cloud, but the photos of human-shaped outlines on walls, floors, and staircases. I know you have — everyone’s seen them. Those outlines where created by bodies shielding the concrete from the A-Bomb’s fire, allowing spots of the city structure to escape the burn. In the city of my story, the only way to spot the people who live there is by their shadows — like the shadows in Hiroshima which existed without a source. In my city, shadows sit on busses and in cabs, flowing like blood along the urban veins. In the real city, where I stood when I wrote, when people rode the trains and busses they stared out of the windows to avoid contact with others. The individuals wanted to avoid the difficult judgments and awkward looks from the faceless crowd, so they crawled into themselves. Try compounding this awkwardness with the fear of others and see how that effects alienation. The fear was widespread. The fear of the potential muggers, rapists, thieves, murderers, and terrorists. The fear of street gangs, and the homeless, and beggars, and the cynical businessman. That’s why I feel like a shadow in the city — because to the city I am only that forgettable, ineffectual number amongst the fearful and alienated. Like the protagonist in Ellison’s Invisible Man, who filled his basement hideaway with light bulbs to drown out the shadows, so he can always see the truth and always know he exists.
Now I know the city has forgotten about me. Right now, I am a nostril hair poking its upper lip or a pimple on its ass. The sun continues to rise and set over the city, rise and set, rise and set, regardless of whoever’s there to see it. Now, walking these cold city streets, it feels as if the whole universe has forgotten about me.
*
Later that night, once Hank and I return to James’ home, the three of us play Scrabble by candlelight. We all drink Pennsylvania lagers, Iron City, Yeungling, and Rolling Rock, which we left in the snow to chill. There’s another eighteen bottles of them, taken from Hank’s old place, cooling on the porch. It feels bizarre to entertain ourselves without electricity, being so used to computers, televisions, hi-fi systems, and Nintendo. In contrast to this, Scrabble feels quaint and satisfying, like a return to the old ways. I used to play it during the summer, while I sat in a coffee shop off Forbes, killing time with other liberal arts students. A friend who took chemistry routinely beat me until we enforced a new rule banning the use of supposed chemical elements and enzymes.
Right now though, in James’ home, I make “Quota” for fourteen points and Hank kicks off a new topic of conversation.
“So over the past few days, how many people have we seen?”
We decide on a figure high enough to count with both hands. James gets “Joke” on a double word score for thirty points. He leads by a margin of sixty-two.
“Yeah, maybe ten between us in the past week,” James concurs, “but in the past few days I’ve not seen anyone but you and Matt.”
“That’s a fair point,” Hank says, “I’ve seen a few, but I’ve been moving around more than you guys. So, in the whole of the city, what would you estimate? One-hundred people left, maybe?”
I contribute my own doubts. “But, you see, it’s hard to hide when there are no other sounds. And there’s always fresh snow on the ground to leave footprints in. Any movement sticks out.”
“True. But there are going to be people holed up pretty tight — people who would prefer to die in their bunkers than risk an infection — so I’m going to place one-hundred people as a liberal estimate. Is that fair?”
“Yeah,” James and I nod in agreement.
“And we’ve seen ten. That’s ten percent, but probably more like fifteen or twenty percent. Right?”
Again, we agree with the line of logic.
“It’s just that, well—” he takes a deep breath, “where are all the women?”
*
He’s right. I’ve barely seen a soul in days, but Hank has seen people while he toured downtown and the surrounding districts. You’d expect to see one woman, if there were any women to see. This is a horrible concept because, of course, without women, well, there can never be any more anything. Ever. At all.
The lack of evidence is our proof, and I mention to Hank and James the problems this presents while Hank spells “Ass” for two points. They both nod gravely, because this time, maybe, just maybe, the lack of evidence might be proof enough. How else can you prove there are no women, other than by not seeing any?
The photo of the bikini clad Karen Spellman feels like it’s burning through my back pocket. Karen Spellman: sexy and tanned in blue, in the sun, on the sand, and smiles all around. Emily Jacobs, now ex-girlfriend, forever ex-girlfriend, sits in my back pocket and is never coming back.
-----------
Chapter 5 is here.
Use the menu on the right to navigate to wherever you are. As always, the whole thing starts at Chapter 1, here.
I've had some great plugs this week, and I love it when people promote my work, so please do that more! Tell all your friends and stick this on Digg and Reddit and all that mumbo-jumbo. Comments and constructive criticism also makes me feel fuzzy inside.
(so would an publisher who wants to give me cash)
Much love,
Dave
---------
4
This morning’s intrusion into the Spellman house has simultaneously renewed my feelings of sickening loss and given me a strange hunger for voyeuristic intrusion. Although looking through the remnants of the old lives is saddening, I want more. I lose myself the masochistic pleasure of searching through the homes, reconstructing in my mind the lives of those who once inhabited the buildings. The ramifications of the G9 plague and the deaths of billions are so enormous that anything other than an escape through fantasy is too much for the mind to cope with. So I do that. I escape through fantasy. I recreate the lives of those who once lived in these homes. I watch my fabrications move around the empty spaces and I pretend nothing has happened. I’m aware that I’m creating fictions — this understanding never leaves my mind — and I’m aware that I need to do this. I’m still sane — I’m just trying to cope.
A forty-minute walk from James’ place is a large house, better described as a manor, which I recall from riding the bus between Oakland and Squirrel Hill. The house was always in a poor condition, with vines creeping up its walls and over its dusty windows, and there’s no guarantee of valuable contents, but the home has fostered a place in my imagination. It’s as good a reason as any other, so with time to kill, I decide to make the trip there.
As I stroll into the driveway, having not seen a soul on the journey, I immediately notice that looters have targeted the home. They’ve smashed all of the bay windows at the front of the building. The building’s main entrance is ajar and I approach it along the gravel driveway, which crunches underfoot, softly muted by a thick layer of snow. In the lobby, old smashed vinyl records and broken photo frames cover the ground. I climb over an upturned couch blocking the door into the kitchen.
In the kitchen, the cupboards are open and their contents spilled on the floor: pots, pans, plates, cutlery, and food. I pick up a box of cheese-flavored biscuits, find it empty, and throw it back to the ground where it clatters onto some silverware. The rear door is open and the wind has blown several feet of snow into the kitchen. There are no footprints in it, so I must be the first person to visit this place in a while.
While I gaze at the destruction around the home, the cold turns my breath into a specter that floats ahead of me. The ghostly image of the otherwise invisible breath leads me to imagine the family who perhaps lived here: mom, dad, and three children in this enormous expanse of a home. Mom pours orange juice and coffee and serves cereal to dad who fastens his tie, ready for a day at the office. The kids scutter about, collecting their lunches, preparing for school. Sometimes mom and dad have parties here, and where I’m standing crowds of life would have milled around, telling stories, drinking their cocktails, serving up another martini, another rum and coke, another Campari and orange. Then a week, maybe ten days ago, mom, dad, and three children caught G9. They suffered for up to three days in a serious condition as the breathing difficulties and heart problems kicked in. The family died soon after and their home, built with years of hard work and care in equal measures, struggling under its old age, is reduced to this present shambles in a matter of days, left in the hands of those few strangers who remain clinging to the threads of life.
It shocks me how suddenly this home became another ambiguous place. I’m unnerved, so I can’t bring myself to look upstairs — the voyeuristic pleasure has left me. Instead of pushing into the interior, I leave through the kitchen door, into the back garden, and down the side of the house, climbing over a snow-buried toy truck.
The air is clear from snowfall, so I take my time walking back to James’ house, kicking up the powder on the sidewalk in weak swishes.
*
Do you know that feeling of being watched? It only manifests itself when the actual chances of being watched are very low. Perhaps the feeling of being watched is only a reaction to how uncomfortable it is for humans, as social animals, to be alone. If there were a genuine potential for people to be looking out of each window on this quiet residential street, I would have no such paranoia. It’s a bizarre feeling, this feeling of a total absence. It’s the feeling of every hair on the back of your neck standing to attention because this is the uncanny in its most distilled of forms.
The city has forgotten I exist. It will always be here, regardless of my presence — it will always stand over me, but it will always be oblivious. A few years ago, in my own creative writing, I was obsessed with the concept how the city functioned as if it were alive — constructed by man, but then given the push and left to roll upon its own steam. In my first year of university, to the neglect of class work, I used to churn out short stories — maybe five a month. They were fine in terms of quality and a few were published in small press journals, but when I found myself with a Grade Point Average of 2.3 by the end of the year and faced the prospect of resitting examinations, I left the stories on my mind’s backburner, and buckled down to work. I never returned to the stories, but they still stick in my mind. I wrote one of the stories after visiting a student photography show that depicted a city, buzzing with vibrancy and life, and lighting up the otherwise cold night. The photographer intended these images to be a celebration of the awesome power of the city, but when I looked at them, rather than seeing vibrancy and fun, I saw people who looked small, ineffectual, and trodden on. To the photographer, the city was a spectacular neon show, but in my eyes, the city was a machine, and I was more interested in the fuel that kept it alive: the people who toiled there every day. Yes, the machine was magnificent, but only at the price of the individual.
In my story, the city literally consumed its inhabitants in its insatiable hunger for growth. The individuals residing in the city’s mechanism were shadows, drowned out by streetlights, headlamps, and neon. Did you ever see those photos of Hiroshima after the A-Bombs were dropped? Not the photos of the mushroom cloud, but the photos of human-shaped outlines on walls, floors, and staircases. I know you have — everyone’s seen them. Those outlines where created by bodies shielding the concrete from the A-Bomb’s fire, allowing spots of the city structure to escape the burn. In the city of my story, the only way to spot the people who live there is by their shadows — like the shadows in Hiroshima which existed without a source. In my city, shadows sit on busses and in cabs, flowing like blood along the urban veins. In the real city, where I stood when I wrote, when people rode the trains and busses they stared out of the windows to avoid contact with others. The individuals wanted to avoid the difficult judgments and awkward looks from the faceless crowd, so they crawled into themselves. Try compounding this awkwardness with the fear of others and see how that effects alienation. The fear was widespread. The fear of the potential muggers, rapists, thieves, murderers, and terrorists. The fear of street gangs, and the homeless, and beggars, and the cynical businessman. That’s why I feel like a shadow in the city — because to the city I am only that forgettable, ineffectual number amongst the fearful and alienated. Like the protagonist in Ellison’s Invisible Man, who filled his basement hideaway with light bulbs to drown out the shadows, so he can always see the truth and always know he exists.
Now I know the city has forgotten about me. Right now, I am a nostril hair poking its upper lip or a pimple on its ass. The sun continues to rise and set over the city, rise and set, rise and set, regardless of whoever’s there to see it. Now, walking these cold city streets, it feels as if the whole universe has forgotten about me.
*
Later that night, once Hank and I return to James’ home, the three of us play Scrabble by candlelight. We all drink Pennsylvania lagers, Iron City, Yeungling, and Rolling Rock, which we left in the snow to chill. There’s another eighteen bottles of them, taken from Hank’s old place, cooling on the porch. It feels bizarre to entertain ourselves without electricity, being so used to computers, televisions, hi-fi systems, and Nintendo. In contrast to this, Scrabble feels quaint and satisfying, like a return to the old ways. I used to play it during the summer, while I sat in a coffee shop off Forbes, killing time with other liberal arts students. A friend who took chemistry routinely beat me until we enforced a new rule banning the use of supposed chemical elements and enzymes.
Right now though, in James’ home, I make “Quota” for fourteen points and Hank kicks off a new topic of conversation.
“So over the past few days, how many people have we seen?”
We decide on a figure high enough to count with both hands. James gets “Joke” on a double word score for thirty points. He leads by a margin of sixty-two.
“Yeah, maybe ten between us in the past week,” James concurs, “but in the past few days I’ve not seen anyone but you and Matt.”
“That’s a fair point,” Hank says, “I’ve seen a few, but I’ve been moving around more than you guys. So, in the whole of the city, what would you estimate? One-hundred people left, maybe?”
I contribute my own doubts. “But, you see, it’s hard to hide when there are no other sounds. And there’s always fresh snow on the ground to leave footprints in. Any movement sticks out.”
“True. But there are going to be people holed up pretty tight — people who would prefer to die in their bunkers than risk an infection — so I’m going to place one-hundred people as a liberal estimate. Is that fair?”
“Yeah,” James and I nod in agreement.
“And we’ve seen ten. That’s ten percent, but probably more like fifteen or twenty percent. Right?”
Again, we agree with the line of logic.
“It’s just that, well—” he takes a deep breath, “where are all the women?”
*
He’s right. I’ve barely seen a soul in days, but Hank has seen people while he toured downtown and the surrounding districts. You’d expect to see one woman, if there were any women to see. This is a horrible concept because, of course, without women, well, there can never be any more anything. Ever. At all.
The lack of evidence is our proof, and I mention to Hank and James the problems this presents while Hank spells “Ass” for two points. They both nod gravely, because this time, maybe, just maybe, the lack of evidence might be proof enough. How else can you prove there are no women, other than by not seeing any?
The photo of the bikini clad Karen Spellman feels like it’s burning through my back pocket. Karen Spellman: sexy and tanned in blue, in the sun, on the sand, and smiles all around. Emily Jacobs, now ex-girlfriend, forever ex-girlfriend, sits in my back pocket and is never coming back.
-----------
Chapter 5 is here.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Part 1, Chapter 3 (Continued)
Here's the second part to Chapter 3. Chapter 4 will be posted on Monday, May 11th. If this is your first visit, A Pittsburgh Storm starts here.
Enjoy your weekend!
Dave
-----------
3 (Continued)
The next week would see every family and individual fighting for themselves, as numbers dwindled, those we loved were lost, and it seemed that everyone else began to crack at the edges. Some people absolutely shattered; the harsh reality destroyed them at their very core and left any vestige of sanity long behind. Bodies were piling up and no individual knew why they were still alive and how long it would stay that way. Were we immune or just lucky? As amenities cut out and the technology we relied upon fell into redundancy, as our reliance on these things came back to haunt us, we found that we had no form of mass communication, information, or even chilled food. Everyone was desperate. I watched (and participated in) looting on the Craig Street businesses, so I smashed up the lobby in my apartment building to imply to others that there’d be nothing left to take. After finishing my own bit of looting, I boarded up the windows, fastened locks to my door, and holed myself up.
I haven’t forgotten what happened to Emily, I could never forget that, but I’ll come back to that later. I promise.
The corpse outside my apartment’s window is the product of the fear the plague instilled in all of us. When a healthy individual believes that they are merely lucky, rather than immune, close contact with anybody else is risking the end of your luck. In our irrationality, most of us believed we were only lucky (though, most of the time, that’s all it was), despite the knowledge that the plague was both air and waterborne and highly infectious. I watched from my window as one man wearing a facemask pushed a shopping cart, half-filled with food, along Forbes Avenue. Another individual approached him and an argument broke out. The second individual wanted the food in the cart. The first was afraid of human contact and possible contamination. The second made a lunge for the cart, and the first produced a gun and fired. For the gunman, there was no fear of retaliation or condemnation.
I think that my fear of man is well founded. In one week, I have seen this cold-blooded murder, that violent form of crowd control, and I’ve been held at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store.
*
James and I are silent on our walk back into Oakland. The events of the past weeks leaves us sullen and depressed, but there’s little else to discuss. So we remain silent. I occupy myself by swinging a crowbar through the slow falling snow. The silence is even more peculiar because we left the dog, Ben, at James home. He was distracted with the bushes in the back yard and didn’t respond to our calls, so we left him to his own devices.
We walk for a while more. Eventually James talks about his short-lived college days, his old fraternity, and we laugh at his college pranks. I recount some of my own college stories in return. I graduated the previous semester, while James dropped out the previous year. Then I tell James about my recent, brief, travels in Europe as an exchange student.
We’re still strolling down Liberty Ave., talking, when we hear an engine in the west. It sounds to be a fair distance away. A mile, maybe? It’s hard to guess. I look at James and he raises his eyebrows. A frown trembles in the corner of his mouth.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
“Let’s keep going and see if it comes closer.”
So we do. We stroll slowly, silently, down Liberty, towards the Bloomfield Bridge, heading in the direction of North Oakland. The engine noise moves to the north a few blocks, but then turns and begins to approach. To my side, James withdraws his pistol from his waistband.
“We should hide before whoever this is gets too close,” I tell James. “At least then we can scope them out and decide want we want to do.” The last thing I want is for James to use the gun.
Fortunately, James nods in agreement, so we duck behind a car, which has crashed into a postbox and juts out across the road at a right angle. Moments later, we spot a snowmobile turn round the corner ahead. Time slows as the sound of the engine approaches. Leaving Ben at home had been a stroke of luck — the dog would sell us out in a heartbeat. The engine lessens in intensity, evidently slowing to a stop, meters from our pathetic hiding place. The rider of the vehicle knows were here, but we remain crouched in the hope that the rider will feign ignorance and pass by. Our hopes are unfounded.
“Hey! Hey, you behind the car.” A man’s voice.
James stands up first and I follow reluctance. A middle-aged man sits on the snowmobile, pointing a hunting rifle at us. James squints as if staring into the sun. Maybe he’s forgotten that he has a pistol in his hand. “Hey,” he stutters to the stranger. He flaps his hand out, and awkwardly pats his thigh with the weapon. This is suicide, I think. But the thick built stranger smiles at us, nods at James, and lowers his rifle. In my relief, the sweat that has accumulated all over my body turns ice-cold. I’m so happy. So fucking happy.
“I figured you guys were safe, or else you wouldn’t have tried to hide just then,” the gray-haired stranger says in a cheerful, youthful voice. “I’m Hank.”
I laugh at my fleeting terror and in the sudden joy at finding another friendly face.
I smile and speak up. “Hi, I’m Matthew. This,” I indicate, “is James.”
“Matthew and James, huh? Hey, I, uh—”
Again, we’re lost for words. Conversation is difficult because we build so many walls. Everyone’s own agenda is survival and we’re scared of having that threatened, so we build walls and block ourselves off. We know were safe now and the walls are unnecessary, but the adrenaline’s still there and we have to stumble over the bricks in conversation.
So, through the rubble, Hank makes small talk. “It’s good to meet you, Matthew, James,” he says, and nods at us in turn. Then, relaxed, he takes off the woolen scarf he wears, exposing a mound of gray stubble on his chin. “Say, uh, so how are you both getting by?” He pulls an awkward expression and we all laugh together.
*
Hank had been hiding out for a few days, but eventually decided that remaining isolated in his apartment was just as likely to kill him. He needed to get out and be proactive about his life. He recalled that his neighbor had made a yearly tradition to load a snowmobile into a trailer and hunt deer north of Toronto. So Hank decided to break into his neighbor’s garage, steal the snowmobile and a hunting rifle, and attempt to better his situation.
I take an immediate shine to Hank.
That morning, he had driven his snowmobile across half of central Pittsburgh — through the Strip District, Downtown, the Hill District, Polish Hill, Oakland, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Bloomfield, Garfield, and Lawrenceville — to find other survivors. So few people remained alive in the city that James and I were the first he had spoken to all day. At least three people, he claims, disappeared down alleyways and into buildings the moment they noticed him. From a loft apartment downtown, a man had yelled things towards Hank that were both indecipherable and aggressive. Hank had kept driving.
Then he then says he spotted small fires from the Northside, near PNC Park — the baseball stadium — and the Warhol museum. Again, these were not the kind of people he was looking for.
And that was all he saw — until he found us.
In accordance with his plan, Hank decided to stick with James and me. So, with a third member in our team, we reassess our framework of ideas with Hank’s input. Hank has a house near to the Strip District, by the Allegheny River, but it’s too run down to stand up to the cold Pittsburgh nights without a working heating system. This means that James’ home wins by default, as it is still the safest and most convenient place of our three choices — well, theoretically, we could live anywhere, but we don’t even consider the idea. It’s still worth picking up the food I’ve gathered in my own apartment and Hank offers to do the same at his place once we show him where James lives.
So as a trio, we ride the snowmobile through the abandoned city, sitting one behind the other, on the way to my apartment. The journey is both exhilarating and saddening. The noise of the engine lets you forget that there are no other sounds for miles around — only blackened windows, and dead, stuffy rooms — but once the engine cuts out the silence crowds back in again, as deafening as before. Once we arrive at my apartment and as we ascend the dead stairwell, we force ourselves to make pointless and casual conversation, just to keep the shroud of silence away.
“This is a cool building Matt. You’re lucky.”
“Oh, thanks.”
But our voices sound small and forced and in the end, in the growing darkness of abandoned buildings, we all know our speech is only there to keep the ghosts of loneliness away.
*
Looking through the window from inside my apartment, snow is falling again, first in light wisps and then, in time, heavy labored clumps. James and Hank loiter with awkward turns and glances while I pack my rucksack with canned food, portable gas canisters, and a few books. Even with so many of the social barriers broken down, James and Hank still stand in the center of my apartment respecting what they regard as my space and my property. Only this morning I broke into a stranger’s home and stole a photo of their daughter wearing a bikini. All sense of personal space has dissolved, but it would seem this apartment is exempt.
A hungry dog howls outside and others respond in the distance. Despite the ramifications of the past week’s terrible losses, that singular dog only cares about it stomach. There must be hundreds of thousands of animals locked up in houses across the country, waiting to starve.
After I finish packing my bag, I take one last glance over the studio apartment that has been my home for the past two years — its junk and clutter and memories. The fridge is still pushed up against the smallest window. Photos are tacked on its door with colorful magnets I collected as a kid. Just like each photo, each magnet recalls cheerful memories. One magnet reads, “I’ve been to Yellowstone!” in yellow, or course, over an illustration of a geyser. I was ten years old when I visited the national park with my family. A tour guide, pleased with my questions and eager to amaze me, told me about all of the tiny microbes that live in the hot vents there. She told me that creatures like these were so important, doing whatever it is they do with enzymes and gasses and so on, that without their existence the whole of the human race would be wiped out. On the contrary, should the human race die, the microbes would only adapt very slightly and carry on as if nothing had happened — they are so powerful. Like those dogs that only worried about their stomachs, these microbes wouldn’t concern themselves with what happened to the human race. And so, right now, all around me are the reminders that nature is carrying on as if nothing has happened. In fact, the eradication of the human race may be one of the best things that has ever happened to nature.
I remove the Yellowstone magnet and retrieve the photo beneath it: Emily and I, drunk at a friend’s birthday party. Then I take a photo of my family, standing on Mount Washington and looking over Pittsburgh’s skyline. I fold the two photographs in half and put them in my back pocket, next to Karen Spellman on that beach in Florida.
I’d made a mess in the kitchen while gathering food. Knives, forks, and empty cartons are scatted over the work surfaces. On the far side of the room, the useless television and computer work as makeshift candle stands. Wax has trickled down into electronics and across the screens. The television was once a shrine that took proud place in my apartment and to which I sacrificed hours of my time every day. Now it’s smeared with wax and defunct. It holds no power over anybody’s time and mind anymore. I look to the desktop computer. With electricity gone from most of (if not all of) the world, perhaps the internet has been erased. Well, no, computers don’t work like that. I know the collected information of the world wide web is sitting dormant on hard drives across the globe, ready for reaccess when civilization returns, one day somewhere in the future. I’m confident civilization will return because without this hope, I have little else.
“Gentlemen,” I say in my brightest tone. “Shall we depart?”
“Lets,” Hank replies with a curtsy.
James nods and we make for the door, leaving it open as we leave, and abandoning my apartment to the ages.
*
I leave my apartment for the final time, and the moment feels weighed with symbolism, as if I’m leaving the entirety of my old life behind. That’s what the ex-literature student in me screams. I’m leaving the comfort of routine and from here on out, nothing will have the slightest resemblance to pre-plague normality — not even the place where I choose to live.
As we sit three deep on the snowmobile and Hank steers us North through the Oakland district, a new chill runs through me. This chill doesn’t come from the intensified snow and falling temperatures. Instead, the chill runs straight up the inside of my spine and through the back of my skull, through my brain, behind my eyes. It’s a foreboding and anxiety for the coming days. I know that things aren’t going to get better — not like they were before. Civilization and society will not be reestablishing themselves any time soon. This is clear to me. This will be a long haul.
*
We return to James’ home and eat a lunch of canned chili and overripe fruit. Afterwards, Hank visits his old apartment to collect his things — he promises to be back within a few hours.
James and I haven’t seen another soul all afternoon, or any evidence that another soul may exist anywhere nearby. No footprints in the fresh snow, no unusual sounds, no lights, and as of today, no more gunshots in the distance.
James and I try to keep busy for the afternoon, but with no commitments or schedules, we’re boggled by our new-found freedom. At one point, I show James the photos I took from my apartment and he shows me the photos he has framed above the fireplace. We regret mentioning our families. Loss tinges the conversation, so I decide to take a walk. James figures he’ll workout. “Gotta’ work for the ‘V’” he jokes.
----------
Chapter 4 is here.
Enjoy your weekend!
Dave
-----------
3 (Continued)
The next week would see every family and individual fighting for themselves, as numbers dwindled, those we loved were lost, and it seemed that everyone else began to crack at the edges. Some people absolutely shattered; the harsh reality destroyed them at their very core and left any vestige of sanity long behind. Bodies were piling up and no individual knew why they were still alive and how long it would stay that way. Were we immune or just lucky? As amenities cut out and the technology we relied upon fell into redundancy, as our reliance on these things came back to haunt us, we found that we had no form of mass communication, information, or even chilled food. Everyone was desperate. I watched (and participated in) looting on the Craig Street businesses, so I smashed up the lobby in my apartment building to imply to others that there’d be nothing left to take. After finishing my own bit of looting, I boarded up the windows, fastened locks to my door, and holed myself up.
I haven’t forgotten what happened to Emily, I could never forget that, but I’ll come back to that later. I promise.
The corpse outside my apartment’s window is the product of the fear the plague instilled in all of us. When a healthy individual believes that they are merely lucky, rather than immune, close contact with anybody else is risking the end of your luck. In our irrationality, most of us believed we were only lucky (though, most of the time, that’s all it was), despite the knowledge that the plague was both air and waterborne and highly infectious. I watched from my window as one man wearing a facemask pushed a shopping cart, half-filled with food, along Forbes Avenue. Another individual approached him and an argument broke out. The second individual wanted the food in the cart. The first was afraid of human contact and possible contamination. The second made a lunge for the cart, and the first produced a gun and fired. For the gunman, there was no fear of retaliation or condemnation.
I think that my fear of man is well founded. In one week, I have seen this cold-blooded murder, that violent form of crowd control, and I’ve been held at gunpoint on the floor of a grocery store.
*
James and I are silent on our walk back into Oakland. The events of the past weeks leaves us sullen and depressed, but there’s little else to discuss. So we remain silent. I occupy myself by swinging a crowbar through the slow falling snow. The silence is even more peculiar because we left the dog, Ben, at James home. He was distracted with the bushes in the back yard and didn’t respond to our calls, so we left him to his own devices.
We walk for a while more. Eventually James talks about his short-lived college days, his old fraternity, and we laugh at his college pranks. I recount some of my own college stories in return. I graduated the previous semester, while James dropped out the previous year. Then I tell James about my recent, brief, travels in Europe as an exchange student.
We’re still strolling down Liberty Ave., talking, when we hear an engine in the west. It sounds to be a fair distance away. A mile, maybe? It’s hard to guess. I look at James and he raises his eyebrows. A frown trembles in the corner of his mouth.
“What do you want to do?” he asks.
“Let’s keep going and see if it comes closer.”
So we do. We stroll slowly, silently, down Liberty, towards the Bloomfield Bridge, heading in the direction of North Oakland. The engine noise moves to the north a few blocks, but then turns and begins to approach. To my side, James withdraws his pistol from his waistband.
“We should hide before whoever this is gets too close,” I tell James. “At least then we can scope them out and decide want we want to do.” The last thing I want is for James to use the gun.
Fortunately, James nods in agreement, so we duck behind a car, which has crashed into a postbox and juts out across the road at a right angle. Moments later, we spot a snowmobile turn round the corner ahead. Time slows as the sound of the engine approaches. Leaving Ben at home had been a stroke of luck — the dog would sell us out in a heartbeat. The engine lessens in intensity, evidently slowing to a stop, meters from our pathetic hiding place. The rider of the vehicle knows were here, but we remain crouched in the hope that the rider will feign ignorance and pass by. Our hopes are unfounded.
“Hey! Hey, you behind the car.” A man’s voice.
James stands up first and I follow reluctance. A middle-aged man sits on the snowmobile, pointing a hunting rifle at us. James squints as if staring into the sun. Maybe he’s forgotten that he has a pistol in his hand. “Hey,” he stutters to the stranger. He flaps his hand out, and awkwardly pats his thigh with the weapon. This is suicide, I think. But the thick built stranger smiles at us, nods at James, and lowers his rifle. In my relief, the sweat that has accumulated all over my body turns ice-cold. I’m so happy. So fucking happy.
“I figured you guys were safe, or else you wouldn’t have tried to hide just then,” the gray-haired stranger says in a cheerful, youthful voice. “I’m Hank.”
I laugh at my fleeting terror and in the sudden joy at finding another friendly face.
I smile and speak up. “Hi, I’m Matthew. This,” I indicate, “is James.”
“Matthew and James, huh? Hey, I, uh—”
Again, we’re lost for words. Conversation is difficult because we build so many walls. Everyone’s own agenda is survival and we’re scared of having that threatened, so we build walls and block ourselves off. We know were safe now and the walls are unnecessary, but the adrenaline’s still there and we have to stumble over the bricks in conversation.
So, through the rubble, Hank makes small talk. “It’s good to meet you, Matthew, James,” he says, and nods at us in turn. Then, relaxed, he takes off the woolen scarf he wears, exposing a mound of gray stubble on his chin. “Say, uh, so how are you both getting by?” He pulls an awkward expression and we all laugh together.
*
Hank had been hiding out for a few days, but eventually decided that remaining isolated in his apartment was just as likely to kill him. He needed to get out and be proactive about his life. He recalled that his neighbor had made a yearly tradition to load a snowmobile into a trailer and hunt deer north of Toronto. So Hank decided to break into his neighbor’s garage, steal the snowmobile and a hunting rifle, and attempt to better his situation.
I take an immediate shine to Hank.
That morning, he had driven his snowmobile across half of central Pittsburgh — through the Strip District, Downtown, the Hill District, Polish Hill, Oakland, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, Bloomfield, Garfield, and Lawrenceville — to find other survivors. So few people remained alive in the city that James and I were the first he had spoken to all day. At least three people, he claims, disappeared down alleyways and into buildings the moment they noticed him. From a loft apartment downtown, a man had yelled things towards Hank that were both indecipherable and aggressive. Hank had kept driving.
Then he then says he spotted small fires from the Northside, near PNC Park — the baseball stadium — and the Warhol museum. Again, these were not the kind of people he was looking for.
And that was all he saw — until he found us.
In accordance with his plan, Hank decided to stick with James and me. So, with a third member in our team, we reassess our framework of ideas with Hank’s input. Hank has a house near to the Strip District, by the Allegheny River, but it’s too run down to stand up to the cold Pittsburgh nights without a working heating system. This means that James’ home wins by default, as it is still the safest and most convenient place of our three choices — well, theoretically, we could live anywhere, but we don’t even consider the idea. It’s still worth picking up the food I’ve gathered in my own apartment and Hank offers to do the same at his place once we show him where James lives.
So as a trio, we ride the snowmobile through the abandoned city, sitting one behind the other, on the way to my apartment. The journey is both exhilarating and saddening. The noise of the engine lets you forget that there are no other sounds for miles around — only blackened windows, and dead, stuffy rooms — but once the engine cuts out the silence crowds back in again, as deafening as before. Once we arrive at my apartment and as we ascend the dead stairwell, we force ourselves to make pointless and casual conversation, just to keep the shroud of silence away.
“This is a cool building Matt. You’re lucky.”
“Oh, thanks.”
But our voices sound small and forced and in the end, in the growing darkness of abandoned buildings, we all know our speech is only there to keep the ghosts of loneliness away.
*
Looking through the window from inside my apartment, snow is falling again, first in light wisps and then, in time, heavy labored clumps. James and Hank loiter with awkward turns and glances while I pack my rucksack with canned food, portable gas canisters, and a few books. Even with so many of the social barriers broken down, James and Hank still stand in the center of my apartment respecting what they regard as my space and my property. Only this morning I broke into a stranger’s home and stole a photo of their daughter wearing a bikini. All sense of personal space has dissolved, but it would seem this apartment is exempt.
A hungry dog howls outside and others respond in the distance. Despite the ramifications of the past week’s terrible losses, that singular dog only cares about it stomach. There must be hundreds of thousands of animals locked up in houses across the country, waiting to starve.
After I finish packing my bag, I take one last glance over the studio apartment that has been my home for the past two years — its junk and clutter and memories. The fridge is still pushed up against the smallest window. Photos are tacked on its door with colorful magnets I collected as a kid. Just like each photo, each magnet recalls cheerful memories. One magnet reads, “I’ve been to Yellowstone!” in yellow, or course, over an illustration of a geyser. I was ten years old when I visited the national park with my family. A tour guide, pleased with my questions and eager to amaze me, told me about all of the tiny microbes that live in the hot vents there. She told me that creatures like these were so important, doing whatever it is they do with enzymes and gasses and so on, that without their existence the whole of the human race would be wiped out. On the contrary, should the human race die, the microbes would only adapt very slightly and carry on as if nothing had happened — they are so powerful. Like those dogs that only worried about their stomachs, these microbes wouldn’t concern themselves with what happened to the human race. And so, right now, all around me are the reminders that nature is carrying on as if nothing has happened. In fact, the eradication of the human race may be one of the best things that has ever happened to nature.
I remove the Yellowstone magnet and retrieve the photo beneath it: Emily and I, drunk at a friend’s birthday party. Then I take a photo of my family, standing on Mount Washington and looking over Pittsburgh’s skyline. I fold the two photographs in half and put them in my back pocket, next to Karen Spellman on that beach in Florida.
I’d made a mess in the kitchen while gathering food. Knives, forks, and empty cartons are scatted over the work surfaces. On the far side of the room, the useless television and computer work as makeshift candle stands. Wax has trickled down into electronics and across the screens. The television was once a shrine that took proud place in my apartment and to which I sacrificed hours of my time every day. Now it’s smeared with wax and defunct. It holds no power over anybody’s time and mind anymore. I look to the desktop computer. With electricity gone from most of (if not all of) the world, perhaps the internet has been erased. Well, no, computers don’t work like that. I know the collected information of the world wide web is sitting dormant on hard drives across the globe, ready for reaccess when civilization returns, one day somewhere in the future. I’m confident civilization will return because without this hope, I have little else.
“Gentlemen,” I say in my brightest tone. “Shall we depart?”
“Lets,” Hank replies with a curtsy.
James nods and we make for the door, leaving it open as we leave, and abandoning my apartment to the ages.
*
I leave my apartment for the final time, and the moment feels weighed with symbolism, as if I’m leaving the entirety of my old life behind. That’s what the ex-literature student in me screams. I’m leaving the comfort of routine and from here on out, nothing will have the slightest resemblance to pre-plague normality — not even the place where I choose to live.
As we sit three deep on the snowmobile and Hank steers us North through the Oakland district, a new chill runs through me. This chill doesn’t come from the intensified snow and falling temperatures. Instead, the chill runs straight up the inside of my spine and through the back of my skull, through my brain, behind my eyes. It’s a foreboding and anxiety for the coming days. I know that things aren’t going to get better — not like they were before. Civilization and society will not be reestablishing themselves any time soon. This is clear to me. This will be a long haul.
*
We return to James’ home and eat a lunch of canned chili and overripe fruit. Afterwards, Hank visits his old apartment to collect his things — he promises to be back within a few hours.
James and I haven’t seen another soul all afternoon, or any evidence that another soul may exist anywhere nearby. No footprints in the fresh snow, no unusual sounds, no lights, and as of today, no more gunshots in the distance.
James and I try to keep busy for the afternoon, but with no commitments or schedules, we’re boggled by our new-found freedom. At one point, I show James the photos I took from my apartment and he shows me the photos he has framed above the fireplace. We regret mentioning our families. Loss tinges the conversation, so I decide to take a walk. James figures he’ll workout. “Gotta’ work for the ‘V’” he jokes.
----------
Chapter 4 is here.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Discounts at Lulu
Until May 10th, if you buy A Pittsburgh Storm from Lulu.com, you'll receive 10% off the cover price. Follow this link, enter the promotional code, "BESTSELLER10", and get the paperback for $8.10, or the ebook for $3.15.
Treat yourself to a bargain, a great read, and support a struggling artist.
Thanks,
Dave
Treat yourself to a bargain, a great read, and support a struggling artist.
Thanks,
Dave
Part 1, Chapter 3
Chapter 3 is long, so I'm posting it in two parts. I'll post the second part on Thursday. Enjoy, and please continue sending in your comments. Constructive criticism is vastly appreciated, as are compliments about my nice hair. If this is your first time, then you should start at Chapter 1.
Enjoy!
-------
3
Later in the morning, James and I decide to walk back to my apartment. We want to pick up the provisions I’ve stored there and look out for a suitable vehicle along the way. We’re looking for an off-roader in good condition. I still want to head home to Bramble and I’m certainly not cycling there. In the interim, we decide that we’ll stay at James’ place rather than mine, both for the sake of comfort and because there’s less chance of any dangerous encounters in his residential neighborhood.
Last nights weather was clear, so the snow on the ground from the previous day has half-melted and refrozen, so the old snow is topped with a light crust of ice that crunches rather than slips.
There’s a cold breeze in the air that whips our faces as we stroll down Liberty. It’s good to be in another’s company after a week of lonely monotony. Together, we finally feel safe walking the streets. Otherwise, when we’re alone, we’re both terrified of who we may find.
James’ fear of man is legitimized by the attempt on his life from an anonymous sniper two days ago, which he told me about yesterday, while I lay on my back in the grocery store. Nobody’s targeted me yet, so my fear comes from what I’ve seen around me. Perhaps the fear makes less sense, but it’s real. Let me explain.
Before the TV stations stopped broadcasting, the twenty-four hour newscasts showed riots in almost every major city across the globe. As individuals found themselves in increasingly desperate situations, they reacted in all kinds of despairing ways. And as the vestiges of law enforcement tried in vain to quell a suddenly lawless society, the public’s anger exploded in a surprisingly predicable manner: wanton destruction of anything and everything; a sheer unfocussed explosion of rage and frustration.
Two weeks back, I witnessed, first-hand, one of those huge, iconic riots. It began at the university housing down the street from my apartment. The high densities of people inside the dorms, even after so many students returned home in worry, meant that the G9 plague spread through the buildings at astonishing rates. In Pittsburgh, the Tower Dormitories — three interconnected circular dorms that resemble giant shampoo bottles — reported a confirmed infection rate of seventy-eight percent. Health authorities responded by enforcing a quarantine on the building. Even at such a high percentage of infection, and despite the mass exodus of students in the area, the (apparently) healthy students numbered two-hundred and eleven scared and panicked individuals.
Outside the building, to a gallery of press representatives, the Chief of Police announced that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” and the Department for Infectious Disease warned that breaking the quarantine would seal the fate of the entire city. Of course, the plague had already sealed the city’s fate, only we didn’t know that yet. Protestors sent word to the mayor, the governor, and anybody that would listen, but to no avail. The cogs of bureaucracy couldn’t turn fast enough to revoke the decision. Instead, the Chief of Police stood by the doors with a rank of officers behind him, threatening to shoot anybody who should try to pass him. Local news said, and I was in the gathering crowd so I can verify, that after three short hours of enforced quarantine, the students, who knew they were doomed no matter what the outcome, started a riot in the Towers’ lobby — a communal area connecting the three buildings. Outside, several thousand fellow objectors joined in. Within minutes the officers enforcing the lock-down were overpowered, doors were rammed open and two-hundred and eleven potentially infectious students ran out to meet several thousand other bodies.
Authorities had dispatched crowd control units before the riot began, as the crowd began to swell in numbers and the officers at the quarantine border found themselves increasingly nervous. Throughout the crowd, protestors were tying bandanas and shirts over their mouths and noses in preparation for the imminent pepper spray and tear gas. Row upon row of masked individuals began to yell and stomp. After the break in quarantine, teenagers clashed with the riot shields. Kids threw bottles.
A fire broke out somewhere.
I watched a girl point accusations at an officer who, in turn, grabbed her arm and pulled her behind the wall of uniforms, shields, and beating clubs. She screamed in despair and a man, maybe her boyfriend, lunged to catch her. Police officer’s subsequently beat the man to the ground. Of course, the crowd responded to events these events and established a chain of escalating violence. Somewhere, someone was firing rubber bullets. I hoped they were rubber bullets.
Much of the time, the mass of other bodies shielded me against the violence. I was an observer, not a participant. But within minutes an unexpected surge in the crowd pushed me forward, those ahead of me broke to the sides, and I found myself on the frontline of the confrontation. I faced a line of cops, three deep, beating plastic shields. These particular men were trained to intimidate and strike fear into the hearts of civilians, whenever necessary, to force submission. I could feel the surge of bodies behind me; the ripple and heat of anger and discontent. I knew that if anybody to my rear pushed forward another couple of steps the officers would attack me. So I thrust my body backwards into the crowd, yelling, shoulders first, and cutting through any gaps I could feel. All around me were screams, threats, and yells. Cops grabbed at arms wherever they could and clubbed at bodies otherwise. A police loudspeaker was calling for order. A protester somewhere in the crowd had their own loudspeaker, and yelled, “Don’t you know it’s illegal to disagree with the government these days? Don’t you know it’s illegal to gather in the streets? Don’t you know it’s illegal to insist on your own human rights?”
I pushed back a few more rows and spotted a canister arching through the air into the crowd. Gas billowed from it and protestors scattered from the area of impact. Then another canister flew at a right angle to the first and landed fifty-yards to my left. A guy on my right yelled in my ear, “FUCKIN’ PIGS!” I joined in with the yelling for a while in the relative safety of numbers and distance, as the atmosphere of conflict intensified in the area. “WE’RE JUST PEOPLE,” I screamed, impotently. The mood shifted again and I continued to push backwards. A cloud of CS gas descended upon me. My throat tightened and my eyes burned, as if someone dropped onions in my eye sockets. No, not onions. It felt like someone dropped razors in there. My nose ran. I was a mess of mucus.
The crowd overturned a car in the street and set it aflame. A fire truck’s horn blasted from the distance.
In time, much of the crowd dispersed into South Oakland — a predominantly residential section — away from the university and the rioting. By the morning, burnt out cars filled South Oakland. Couches were pulled into the road and burned in enormous pyres of rage.
That night, the crowd eventually turned upon itself, as anger at the injustice of the police turned to anger at the injustice of the plague. All it took was a bit of looting and a personal vendetta before the violence became as pandemic as the plague.
Within twelve to thirty-six hours, individuals would find the plague had spread to them and regret being in the hive of infection that day. Tragically, they would die before realizing that their involvement with that crowd didn’t make any difference to their health at all. They would have died eventually, no matter how they decided to spend their final days.
But back in that moment, as the fire engine used its hose on the crowd rather than the fire, I squeezed down one of the tributaries formed between the advancing rows of riot police. I came out running into East Oakland, perhaps two hundred yards from the riot’s epicenter. Several other protestors were running alongside me and the cops focused their attention on those continuing to provoke the violence, letting us pass unhindered. I looked back at the mess of people who now formed scattered clumps. Gas canisters soared and billowed and fire engine hoses blasted those individuals who showed particular tenacity.
My nose still ran and my eyes stung from the CS gas, so I wiped my face with my shirt, leaving a trail of mucus on my chest, and cleared the tears from my vision. Standing still, I looked up again and stared in disbelief as officers fired guns into the crowd and then the crowd fired back at the police. Screaming was intensified. A woman lay on the ground close to me, atop a small, but growing, puddle of blood. It must have been a stray bullet. It must have been.
Behind me, restrained teenagers were bundled into trucks by armed and masked police officers. By that time, the authorities had closed the overflowing, infection-filled hospitals, and the woman on the ground would have died if someone didn’t help her. I went over to her body and tried to lift her onto my shoulders, and another woman stopped to help me. I took off my belt and we attempted to apply it as a tourniquet on the injured woman’s bleeding leg. She was unconscious from shock. Once we stemmed the blood flow, we picked her up again and balanced her across my shoulders. Somehow, I jogged with the woman balanced there for a hundred meters or so, with the kind stranger helping me handle the extra weight. Eventually she turned south herself, heading towards Schenley Park and yelling over her shoulder, “Good luck!”
With the injured woman on my shoulders, I arrived at Craig Street and hobbled towards my apartment. A careful balancing act got me through the front door and up the stairwell. Emily was in my apartment when I arrived. I was bloodied, red-eyed, covered with my own mucus, and had a woman draped over my shoulder, dripping blood on the floor.
Emily yelled, “What the fuck?”
Earlier that night, she’d asked me to stay home because, as the world was turning to shit, she didn’t want me putting my life in any further risk. She’d begged me to stay in the apartment and to watch what we could from the window or fire escape, but in the end, I was selfish and I went anyway. “I promise I won’t stay long,” I had yelled over my shoulder and left her there alone. I wanted to see the event. I’m a dick sometimes. I knew that, but I didn’t care.
And now Emily’s fears were proven legitimate. I had a stranger on my back, bleeding on the ground, and Emily rushed to help me. “I don’t know who this is, but she’s bleeding bad.” Emily helped take me distribute the weight and lift the woman from my shoulders. “It’s chaos down there; they broke the quarantine in the Towers.”
“Fuck. People were trying to break into the lobby here you know?”
I didn’t reply. I was exhausted.
“Get her on the couch,” Emily said. “Come on.”
------
Continued here.
If you enjoy A Pittsburgh Storm, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook (only $1.25) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.
Dave
Enjoy!
-------
3
Later in the morning, James and I decide to walk back to my apartment. We want to pick up the provisions I’ve stored there and look out for a suitable vehicle along the way. We’re looking for an off-roader in good condition. I still want to head home to Bramble and I’m certainly not cycling there. In the interim, we decide that we’ll stay at James’ place rather than mine, both for the sake of comfort and because there’s less chance of any dangerous encounters in his residential neighborhood.
Last nights weather was clear, so the snow on the ground from the previous day has half-melted and refrozen, so the old snow is topped with a light crust of ice that crunches rather than slips.
There’s a cold breeze in the air that whips our faces as we stroll down Liberty. It’s good to be in another’s company after a week of lonely monotony. Together, we finally feel safe walking the streets. Otherwise, when we’re alone, we’re both terrified of who we may find.
James’ fear of man is legitimized by the attempt on his life from an anonymous sniper two days ago, which he told me about yesterday, while I lay on my back in the grocery store. Nobody’s targeted me yet, so my fear comes from what I’ve seen around me. Perhaps the fear makes less sense, but it’s real. Let me explain.
Before the TV stations stopped broadcasting, the twenty-four hour newscasts showed riots in almost every major city across the globe. As individuals found themselves in increasingly desperate situations, they reacted in all kinds of despairing ways. And as the vestiges of law enforcement tried in vain to quell a suddenly lawless society, the public’s anger exploded in a surprisingly predicable manner: wanton destruction of anything and everything; a sheer unfocussed explosion of rage and frustration.
Two weeks back, I witnessed, first-hand, one of those huge, iconic riots. It began at the university housing down the street from my apartment. The high densities of people inside the dorms, even after so many students returned home in worry, meant that the G9 plague spread through the buildings at astonishing rates. In Pittsburgh, the Tower Dormitories — three interconnected circular dorms that resemble giant shampoo bottles — reported a confirmed infection rate of seventy-eight percent. Health authorities responded by enforcing a quarantine on the building. Even at such a high percentage of infection, and despite the mass exodus of students in the area, the (apparently) healthy students numbered two-hundred and eleven scared and panicked individuals.
Outside the building, to a gallery of press representatives, the Chief of Police announced that “desperate times call for desperate measures,” and the Department for Infectious Disease warned that breaking the quarantine would seal the fate of the entire city. Of course, the plague had already sealed the city’s fate, only we didn’t know that yet. Protestors sent word to the mayor, the governor, and anybody that would listen, but to no avail. The cogs of bureaucracy couldn’t turn fast enough to revoke the decision. Instead, the Chief of Police stood by the doors with a rank of officers behind him, threatening to shoot anybody who should try to pass him. Local news said, and I was in the gathering crowd so I can verify, that after three short hours of enforced quarantine, the students, who knew they were doomed no matter what the outcome, started a riot in the Towers’ lobby — a communal area connecting the three buildings. Outside, several thousand fellow objectors joined in. Within minutes the officers enforcing the lock-down were overpowered, doors were rammed open and two-hundred and eleven potentially infectious students ran out to meet several thousand other bodies.
Authorities had dispatched crowd control units before the riot began, as the crowd began to swell in numbers and the officers at the quarantine border found themselves increasingly nervous. Throughout the crowd, protestors were tying bandanas and shirts over their mouths and noses in preparation for the imminent pepper spray and tear gas. Row upon row of masked individuals began to yell and stomp. After the break in quarantine, teenagers clashed with the riot shields. Kids threw bottles.
A fire broke out somewhere.
I watched a girl point accusations at an officer who, in turn, grabbed her arm and pulled her behind the wall of uniforms, shields, and beating clubs. She screamed in despair and a man, maybe her boyfriend, lunged to catch her. Police officer’s subsequently beat the man to the ground. Of course, the crowd responded to events these events and established a chain of escalating violence. Somewhere, someone was firing rubber bullets. I hoped they were rubber bullets.
Much of the time, the mass of other bodies shielded me against the violence. I was an observer, not a participant. But within minutes an unexpected surge in the crowd pushed me forward, those ahead of me broke to the sides, and I found myself on the frontline of the confrontation. I faced a line of cops, three deep, beating plastic shields. These particular men were trained to intimidate and strike fear into the hearts of civilians, whenever necessary, to force submission. I could feel the surge of bodies behind me; the ripple and heat of anger and discontent. I knew that if anybody to my rear pushed forward another couple of steps the officers would attack me. So I thrust my body backwards into the crowd, yelling, shoulders first, and cutting through any gaps I could feel. All around me were screams, threats, and yells. Cops grabbed at arms wherever they could and clubbed at bodies otherwise. A police loudspeaker was calling for order. A protester somewhere in the crowd had their own loudspeaker, and yelled, “Don’t you know it’s illegal to disagree with the government these days? Don’t you know it’s illegal to gather in the streets? Don’t you know it’s illegal to insist on your own human rights?”
I pushed back a few more rows and spotted a canister arching through the air into the crowd. Gas billowed from it and protestors scattered from the area of impact. Then another canister flew at a right angle to the first and landed fifty-yards to my left. A guy on my right yelled in my ear, “FUCKIN’ PIGS!” I joined in with the yelling for a while in the relative safety of numbers and distance, as the atmosphere of conflict intensified in the area. “WE’RE JUST PEOPLE,” I screamed, impotently. The mood shifted again and I continued to push backwards. A cloud of CS gas descended upon me. My throat tightened and my eyes burned, as if someone dropped onions in my eye sockets. No, not onions. It felt like someone dropped razors in there. My nose ran. I was a mess of mucus.
The crowd overturned a car in the street and set it aflame. A fire truck’s horn blasted from the distance.
In time, much of the crowd dispersed into South Oakland — a predominantly residential section — away from the university and the rioting. By the morning, burnt out cars filled South Oakland. Couches were pulled into the road and burned in enormous pyres of rage.
That night, the crowd eventually turned upon itself, as anger at the injustice of the police turned to anger at the injustice of the plague. All it took was a bit of looting and a personal vendetta before the violence became as pandemic as the plague.
Within twelve to thirty-six hours, individuals would find the plague had spread to them and regret being in the hive of infection that day. Tragically, they would die before realizing that their involvement with that crowd didn’t make any difference to their health at all. They would have died eventually, no matter how they decided to spend their final days.
But back in that moment, as the fire engine used its hose on the crowd rather than the fire, I squeezed down one of the tributaries formed between the advancing rows of riot police. I came out running into East Oakland, perhaps two hundred yards from the riot’s epicenter. Several other protestors were running alongside me and the cops focused their attention on those continuing to provoke the violence, letting us pass unhindered. I looked back at the mess of people who now formed scattered clumps. Gas canisters soared and billowed and fire engine hoses blasted those individuals who showed particular tenacity.
My nose still ran and my eyes stung from the CS gas, so I wiped my face with my shirt, leaving a trail of mucus on my chest, and cleared the tears from my vision. Standing still, I looked up again and stared in disbelief as officers fired guns into the crowd and then the crowd fired back at the police. Screaming was intensified. A woman lay on the ground close to me, atop a small, but growing, puddle of blood. It must have been a stray bullet. It must have been.
Behind me, restrained teenagers were bundled into trucks by armed and masked police officers. By that time, the authorities had closed the overflowing, infection-filled hospitals, and the woman on the ground would have died if someone didn’t help her. I went over to her body and tried to lift her onto my shoulders, and another woman stopped to help me. I took off my belt and we attempted to apply it as a tourniquet on the injured woman’s bleeding leg. She was unconscious from shock. Once we stemmed the blood flow, we picked her up again and balanced her across my shoulders. Somehow, I jogged with the woman balanced there for a hundred meters or so, with the kind stranger helping me handle the extra weight. Eventually she turned south herself, heading towards Schenley Park and yelling over her shoulder, “Good luck!”
With the injured woman on my shoulders, I arrived at Craig Street and hobbled towards my apartment. A careful balancing act got me through the front door and up the stairwell. Emily was in my apartment when I arrived. I was bloodied, red-eyed, covered with my own mucus, and had a woman draped over my shoulder, dripping blood on the floor.
Emily yelled, “What the fuck?”
Earlier that night, she’d asked me to stay home because, as the world was turning to shit, she didn’t want me putting my life in any further risk. She’d begged me to stay in the apartment and to watch what we could from the window or fire escape, but in the end, I was selfish and I went anyway. “I promise I won’t stay long,” I had yelled over my shoulder and left her there alone. I wanted to see the event. I’m a dick sometimes. I knew that, but I didn’t care.
And now Emily’s fears were proven legitimate. I had a stranger on my back, bleeding on the ground, and Emily rushed to help me. “I don’t know who this is, but she’s bleeding bad.” Emily helped take me distribute the weight and lift the woman from my shoulders. “It’s chaos down there; they broke the quarantine in the Towers.”
“Fuck. People were trying to break into the lobby here you know?”
I didn’t reply. I was exhausted.
“Get her on the couch,” Emily said. “Come on.”
------
Continued here.
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Dave
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