Here's the second half of Part 3, Chapter 1. Cue weird sex scene!
I'll post Chapter 2 on Thursday, July 2nd.
All the best,
Dave
--------
1 (Continued)
The sun sets and so I decide to find a place for the night. This task shouldn’t be too difficult and I soon find a particularly promising street.
Upon my approach, I maneuver around the overturned cars at the end of the block. The residents of the street placed them there to act as barricades, though it doesn’t really work. Next to the barricades, hanging from a streetlight, a large plywood sign reads in large black painted letters, “PRIVATE PROPERTY – TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT”. And daubed underneath, the words, “With No Warning!”
I’d seen streets like these on the news broadcasts, when my TV had still been able to receive broadcasts. Communities or work places formed together and barricaded buildings or whole streets from looters, trying to create self-sufficient enclaves similar to Mecca. Of course, these enclaves fell apart as the plague indiscriminately removed members from the ranks. Eventually, nobody was left alive to mount the defense, but by then there were few looters left to defend against and little of value left to take. These days the only things of true value are immediate practicalities: food, fuel, clean water, and firewood. Hopefully, this street’s former life as an enclave will mean there will be something worth finding.
So I crawl the snowmobile along the road. The waving sign unnerves me slightly, but I know nobody will be firing bullets today. By now, everybody who once inhabited this street is either dead or left the city a long time ago. I take in the smashed windows around me, and the random bits of junk in gardens and on the road. Desolation here first, then at a neighbor’s. Then another home ruined. Desperation makes bullets sound in the night, and then, soon enough, in the daytime too. And now there’s nothing but this mess.
I decide to stay at an old square protestant house in the centre of the block. I choose it because it has most of its windows intact and so it should keep the wind, rain, and snow outside for the night, if nothing else. The building is a perfect cube; its length, width, and height the same. I call it a protestant house because my mom called these places protestant houses. I presume this is because protestant’s want things clean and simple. My mom was prone to generalizing.
I pull the snowmobile up by the side of the protestant house and enter through the building’s side door, stepping onto the basement’s stairwell. I have to crack open the door between the basement and the kitchen with the crowbar. When I place the crowbar between the door and the frame, I notice the dried blood on the end of the tool, and then, looking down, the dried blood that spatters my coat. Oh fuck. The dread sinks down through my chest. Dread first and then a racing heart of panic. Do I have blood on my face? Am I literally the walking face of guilt? This is a fucking disaster. I’m crying again.
I take a moment for deep breathing and try to compose myself. I feel light headed. In the toxic mixture of guilt and anxiety, the world begins to sway.
Calm the fuck down, Matt, I tell myself. Relax.
Time passes. I’m moaning, but then as quickly as this started, the panic begins to subside. I look at the crowbar, the blood, and feel nothing once again, except the frown pulling at my face. So I jam the weapon back between the door and the frame, pull it towards my body, and the door flings open upon its hinges.
I move into the kitchen and through home’s lower rooms. The air is stagnant with a strange, but expected, rotting smell. A smell like old damp clothes. I climb the stairwell, past photographs of the six-person family who had once lived here: mom, dad, three sisters, and a brother. Like a negative image of my own family. Then I pass some paintings, all by the same artist. Lilly pads and country homes. Monet, I think.
I find each member of the family in their room and in their respective beds. The last to die was one of the teenage girls. I know this because she lies in a mess of shit-covered sheets, face down in a pillow. Each of the other bodies lie face up and composed in clean, smooth sheets. Obviously, the remaining family members gave dignity to the dead, by laying them down, clean and graceful.
I’m tempted to look through the rooms of the three daughters, as I’d done to Karen Spellman’s room, but guilt overrides these impulses and leaves me feeling nauseous. And then something else makes my stomach churn and I feel weak. My limbs wobble and I break into a sweat. I need to sit down, so I do, right there, on the ground in the upstairs hallway. My head spins. I feel electricity in my brain. The world swims in and out of dizzy focus. I lose my peripheral vision and vaguely feel myself slump sideways to hit the carpet. I’m aware of each coil of fabric pushing against my cheek and I feel the perspiration on the other side of my face turn ice cold. The carpet is so very comfortable, is all I think as the room slips into darkness.
Somewhere, a bird is singing.
The world switches off.
*
When the infected woman, Laura, left the apartment, I locked the hallway door behind her, paused to listen for her fading footsteps, and turned around to look into Emily’s worried face. She held the damp t-shirt in her hand; a talisman for defense from airborne germs. But we knew such a defense wouldn’t work. All we had were gestures because we could find no enemy to fight. Only biology. There was no bad guy. Nobody to take the blame. Nobody to take practical action against. So we created these symbols of defiance, like a scarf or a facemask. They emphasized that we would not die like animals, without a fight, without a care, and that we valued this life over the alternative the virus offered. Even if we could do nothing about it and even if we knew it was already too late and even if we had to evict innocent helpless women from our homes. What did I say about not being an animal?
From the other side of the room, Emily flashed me a weak smile, and I returned one in kind.
I returned to the bed and sat on the edge, my back hunched and my eyes staring to the ground. Emily stayed in the far corner and mirrored my posture. We both knew there was no point in talking. We both felt terrible for what we’d done.
Minutes passed, and Emily moved to my side, stroking her hand through my hair. The grief began to fade into a sore numb point, so she sat down next to me, hugged my side, and finally lay back on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I wondered if sex would make the situation better or if my previous act would instead consume the moment. I mulled over that question while a dog barked in the street.
I didn’t move for a long time and eventually, understanding my turmoil, she put her hand on my shoulder. I turned to gaze at her, and she pulled me down.
I wondered if, were I with someone else, rather than Emily, would they have allowed this to happen at all? I mean, would they have taken a part in the eviction and helped share the blame? And it made me bitter. I conducted that terrible act alone and so the sex was wasted in an effort to mask the events of that night. If she had shared the responsibility in the first place, we wouldn’t have had to have sex to make up for it, and I wouldn’t have felt so cold towards her. We would have had normal sex, as we normally did – fun sex and satisfying sex. And I knew the resentment was going to bleed over into the next morning.
But in fact, it was all forgotten. The bitterness of that night stayed with that night.
Because the next morning, Emily awoke with a cough that emanated from deep down in her lungs. A million malicious microbes making a new home and preparing to destroy her from the inside out. She’d caught G9.
I didn’t know how my emotions would ever work again.
*
The world swims back into focus. Lights dance in front of my eyes and my limbs feel weak but I manage to sit up and blink away the confusion. Darkness shrouds the hallway, masking everything except the feint edges of objects.
The very first thing I think of is what I did to Hank.
Maybe my mind isn’t as straight as I thought it was. I did lose consciousness after all. I feel sick to my stomach. I keep seeing Hank’s crumpled body in the snow and crowbar in my hand.
I killed a man.
The world swims and blurs again. I feel the movement translate in my stomach and brain. The world swells and pulses, swerves to the left, then right, and left again. The scary part is that I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My face feels heavy and when I try to speak my mouth doesn’t move the way I want it to. All I can utter are guttural vowel sounds. So I have to sit and wait while the world simmers down.
I take a deep breath and tell myself, “Calm down.”
I don’t know how long I sit there but eventually I get to my feet, holding on to the banister to maintain balance. The first thing I notice at this new orientation is how parched my throat feels. I stumble into the bathroom and turn on the faucets at the sink. Nothing happens; the water supply stopped working over a week ago. I turn around and lift the lid of the toilet cistern, which is full of stagnant, ice-cold water. I drink it with my cupped hands and let it run down my neck.
After satisfying the need for water my body screams for more rest, so I stumble down the stairs with an awkward gait and grab my bag from the side of the door. I pull a blanket out and lie down on the couch. It’s a cold night but my eyes are so heavy that I’m sure I won’t feel the chill. I wrap my body further in the couch covers and push my face into the cushions. For a while, darkness becomes absolute.
-------
If you enjoyed this, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook ($1.25!) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Part 3, Chapter 1 (First Half)
Well with another murder under our belts, here's the first chapter of Part 3. This is quite a long chapter so I'll break it into two parts again, as few people want an endless ream of text. I'll post the second half on Sunday. I also have a special update planned before then, about the state of free literature. Stay tuned!
Don't forget, if you can't wait for the next part, you can buy the ebook and support independent publishing for only $1.25 by following the links on the right. The ebook is available in just about every format you'll ever need, and a paperback is also available from Lulu.com (with a free ebook, if you email me confirmation of purchase).
If you're new here, this is the thirteenth chapter of A Pittsburgh Storm. It may be best for you to find your feet in the first chapter, over here.
Enjoy!
Dave
---------
Part Three
Bramble, PA
1
I spend most of the afternoon driving through the lower Hill District, then across Downtown, and into Pittsburgh’s Northside. Downtown is a mess, as bad as Oakland and the Southside.
I pass PPG Place; huge glass towers which Hank and I viewed from the roof of an apartment building in the Southside only days ago. We watched as a man pushed desks out of the windows and screamed obscenities into the wind. Now I can see, close up, the office furnishings smashed up and scattered across the road. There’s no sign of the man who did this.
Snow buries the ice rink at the base of the towers, where, every Christmas as a kid, I would visit with my dad, my brothers, and some cousins. The rink would fill with other children, families, teenage kids, and couples on dates, skating in rings, racing, and playing games.
The happy nostalgia that the rink conjures fills me with a tingling warmth and a thin smile, regardless of what I did only an hour ago. I know I should feel terrible and horrified, but I feel nothing; I’m cold to present reality. Only nostalgia and childhood memories seep though the frost. Everything else is mute.
One time, Emily and I came on a date here. We had to queue for an age to get on the ice and my boots were a poor fit, which made my toes go numb, but we loved every minute of our time there. All we did was skate in a loop for a while, race a bit, and fall over. I was so happy, but since all of this upheaval happened, I sometimes ask myself if I really loved Emily. I mean, I’ve barely missed her; she’s hardly been on my mind. I feel like her presence, or lack of, should weigh more heavily on me than it does. Then, when I think back on events like our date at PPG, I’m sure I did love her. I don’t know how I feel anymore.
There’s a whiskey bottle by the side of a corpse on the edge of the rink. I climb off the snowmobile to approach, but find the bottle empty. Next to it, the frozen corpse’s skin has adopted a milky white sheen. Perhaps this is how Hank now looks; it’s been an hour, after all. Then, maybe he didn’t die.
A banner advertisement hangs by one post with one of its ends trailing on the ground and fluttering in the wind. It reads, “ENJOY THE ICE AT PPG”. The movement catches my eye, before I return my attention to the body, sagging in the snow. In this man’s last moments, he decided to drink until he was numb and sit out in the cold to allow the comfort of death to take him from this waking nightmare. And now, here I am, scrutinizing the remains of this person’s most intimate and profound moment, and I reduce their life and loves and achievements to this.
A cold gust of wind wakes me from my daydream and again lifts the banner from the ground. The vinyl claps in aggression. Sheets of paper blow across the rink in their successful bid to escape a defunct office somewhere.
And the snowmobile takes me further north.
*
An unending slideshow of traffic and debris clogs the streets. A burst fire hydrant covers swathes of a sidewalk with sheets of ice and frozen sculptures have formed on the side of a car caught in the spray. Huge jagged teeth and spectacular spires of ice stuck to the metalwork.
I see many more bodies. Anonymous characters in cars or splayed across the sidewalk.
I pass shops, looted long ago. Offices made into makeshift fortresses with barbed wire windows and boarded up doorways. I don’t waste time checking for life.
Then I arrive at the Sixth Street Bridge and squeeze the snowmobile across. The Allegheny River rushes beneath me, swelled by the past few weeks of snowfall, and laboring under its own weight. It carries the occasional abandoned car on its surface, pulling it to the west, with the water black and muddy.
The Northside and the Northern residential districts take another ninety minutes to cross. Inching my way through debris, I take in the desolate homes and businesses that line the streets. My mind wavers in and out of the present, now churning over the events of the day with a detached, distant connection. The unmasking of Mistress Sylvia; the fall of Mecca; the murder I committed only hours ago.
A dog is howling from inside a home. As I drive by the building, I see the animal jump at the living room’s window. It’s a mean looking Rottweiler. As it sees me, it emits a howl of desperation and hate, its teeth gnashing and saliva splattering against the inside of the window. Trapped and desperate. I keep driving.
More time passes, the minutes tick into hours, and I notice that the snowmobile’s fuel gauge is pushing on empty. Furthermore, I’m famished. My throat is dry and bitter. I tilt my head and catch the falling snow on my tongue, but this is a more a gesture, not a practicality.
Before I do anything else, I need to keep the snowmobile running. I doubt I’ll find a fuel stash any time soon, so the only option left is to siphon gas from another vehicle. I know the basics of how to do this because I read about it in a survival book when I was a kid. It was on of those books which tells you how to survive in a rainforest or in the Arctic, how to escape from quicksand, and how to treat a snakebite. All those things that an inquisitive ten-year-old needs to know. I can remember the theory of how to siphon fuel, but I’ve never done it for real.
And on top of that, finding a suitable vehicle proves difficult. This is because news reports often blamed the spread of G9 on the dense conditions that defined city life, and consequently, millions of people fled to the country in a futile bid to outrun the disease. Countless cars filled the roads out of the city, all heading to relatives’ homes, or campgrounds, or wherever else the road could take them. Panicking crowds bought up all of the fuel supplies, legitimately fearing that gasoline would soon be a rare commodity. The problem is that none of these full gas-tanks are in the city any more.
And of those cars that were in the city, looters have already taken most of the fuel and batteries.
While all of this was happening around me, the sheer speed at which the society’s infrastructure fell apart left me in awe. Once a proportion of tanker drivers and long haul truckers fell ill, a vital link in the supply chain was missing. Stores, hospitals, and gas stations all rely on short deliveries – small and frequent – and so, when these finished, everything fell apart. Within days, a third of drivers were without fuel. Subsequently, stores were empty and hospitals ran out of oxygen tanks. The news broadcasts stated that power stations should have had a twenty-day supply of fuel to keep the electricity going and the water pumping. That’s in theory anyway. In reality, we all found ourselves in a lot of trouble, very quickly. There was little water, little gas, little food, little hospital resources, and the ever threatening G9 plague. So everyone who could run, did so. The roads turned chaotic and sluggish. It was a mess, and still is.
I hunt for old cars, which I assume will be easier to siphon. The first rusting heap I find has an empty tank and spits a lungful of sickening gasoline air. But the second car I approach has some has in the tank and I manage to pour a decent amount into an empty bucket found in a snow-filled gutter.
With that success under my belt, I take stock of the food situation. I have a few assorted pieces of food in my bag, and spotting an open diner, I decide to utilize the relative comfort. I choose a stool by the coffee bar. “Service please!” I yell into the back and there’s a clatter of pans in response. A rodent scared by my voice. But things like this no longer make me jumpy.
On the stool, by the bar, I eat my cold meal — an apple and pack of peanut butter pretzels – while admiring a photo of the Sydney Opera House, framed above the coffee machines. To my left, above the cake cabinet, is another framed photograph, this time of a battleship in profile, with guns pointing proudly and radar dish spinning against the setting sun. The image brings to mind of one of the few human-interest stories shown on the news broadcasts before the electricity stopped. Somewhere in the pacific, a U.S. cargo ship was sailing without direction. The crew were healthy, they claimed in a radio broadcast, but feared to return to a potentially dangerous dock. No doubt, some of the crew would have preferred to die with their ill families but the captain had decreed that they would stay at sea for as long as it took to clear things up on land. By now, I suppose, they have all starved. Perhaps they staged a mutiny and docked down in California. Or perhaps they’re still alive, perhaps sat on a desert island eating pineapples in the sun, hoping all this will blow over. Could there be a woman amongst them? I muse on this while eating the pretzels and taking long swigs from my water bottle.
Don't forget, if you can't wait for the next part, you can buy the ebook and support independent publishing for only $1.25 by following the links on the right. The ebook is available in just about every format you'll ever need, and a paperback is also available from Lulu.com (with a free ebook, if you email me confirmation of purchase).
If you're new here, this is the thirteenth chapter of A Pittsburgh Storm. It may be best for you to find your feet in the first chapter, over here.
Enjoy!
Dave
---------
Part Three
Bramble, PA
1
I spend most of the afternoon driving through the lower Hill District, then across Downtown, and into Pittsburgh’s Northside. Downtown is a mess, as bad as Oakland and the Southside.
I pass PPG Place; huge glass towers which Hank and I viewed from the roof of an apartment building in the Southside only days ago. We watched as a man pushed desks out of the windows and screamed obscenities into the wind. Now I can see, close up, the office furnishings smashed up and scattered across the road. There’s no sign of the man who did this.
Snow buries the ice rink at the base of the towers, where, every Christmas as a kid, I would visit with my dad, my brothers, and some cousins. The rink would fill with other children, families, teenage kids, and couples on dates, skating in rings, racing, and playing games.
The happy nostalgia that the rink conjures fills me with a tingling warmth and a thin smile, regardless of what I did only an hour ago. I know I should feel terrible and horrified, but I feel nothing; I’m cold to present reality. Only nostalgia and childhood memories seep though the frost. Everything else is mute.
One time, Emily and I came on a date here. We had to queue for an age to get on the ice and my boots were a poor fit, which made my toes go numb, but we loved every minute of our time there. All we did was skate in a loop for a while, race a bit, and fall over. I was so happy, but since all of this upheaval happened, I sometimes ask myself if I really loved Emily. I mean, I’ve barely missed her; she’s hardly been on my mind. I feel like her presence, or lack of, should weigh more heavily on me than it does. Then, when I think back on events like our date at PPG, I’m sure I did love her. I don’t know how I feel anymore.
There’s a whiskey bottle by the side of a corpse on the edge of the rink. I climb off the snowmobile to approach, but find the bottle empty. Next to it, the frozen corpse’s skin has adopted a milky white sheen. Perhaps this is how Hank now looks; it’s been an hour, after all. Then, maybe he didn’t die.
A banner advertisement hangs by one post with one of its ends trailing on the ground and fluttering in the wind. It reads, “ENJOY THE ICE AT PPG”. The movement catches my eye, before I return my attention to the body, sagging in the snow. In this man’s last moments, he decided to drink until he was numb and sit out in the cold to allow the comfort of death to take him from this waking nightmare. And now, here I am, scrutinizing the remains of this person’s most intimate and profound moment, and I reduce their life and loves and achievements to this.
A cold gust of wind wakes me from my daydream and again lifts the banner from the ground. The vinyl claps in aggression. Sheets of paper blow across the rink in their successful bid to escape a defunct office somewhere.
And the snowmobile takes me further north.
*
An unending slideshow of traffic and debris clogs the streets. A burst fire hydrant covers swathes of a sidewalk with sheets of ice and frozen sculptures have formed on the side of a car caught in the spray. Huge jagged teeth and spectacular spires of ice stuck to the metalwork.
I see many more bodies. Anonymous characters in cars or splayed across the sidewalk.
I pass shops, looted long ago. Offices made into makeshift fortresses with barbed wire windows and boarded up doorways. I don’t waste time checking for life.
Then I arrive at the Sixth Street Bridge and squeeze the snowmobile across. The Allegheny River rushes beneath me, swelled by the past few weeks of snowfall, and laboring under its own weight. It carries the occasional abandoned car on its surface, pulling it to the west, with the water black and muddy.
The Northside and the Northern residential districts take another ninety minutes to cross. Inching my way through debris, I take in the desolate homes and businesses that line the streets. My mind wavers in and out of the present, now churning over the events of the day with a detached, distant connection. The unmasking of Mistress Sylvia; the fall of Mecca; the murder I committed only hours ago.
A dog is howling from inside a home. As I drive by the building, I see the animal jump at the living room’s window. It’s a mean looking Rottweiler. As it sees me, it emits a howl of desperation and hate, its teeth gnashing and saliva splattering against the inside of the window. Trapped and desperate. I keep driving.
More time passes, the minutes tick into hours, and I notice that the snowmobile’s fuel gauge is pushing on empty. Furthermore, I’m famished. My throat is dry and bitter. I tilt my head and catch the falling snow on my tongue, but this is a more a gesture, not a practicality.
Before I do anything else, I need to keep the snowmobile running. I doubt I’ll find a fuel stash any time soon, so the only option left is to siphon gas from another vehicle. I know the basics of how to do this because I read about it in a survival book when I was a kid. It was on of those books which tells you how to survive in a rainforest or in the Arctic, how to escape from quicksand, and how to treat a snakebite. All those things that an inquisitive ten-year-old needs to know. I can remember the theory of how to siphon fuel, but I’ve never done it for real.
And on top of that, finding a suitable vehicle proves difficult. This is because news reports often blamed the spread of G9 on the dense conditions that defined city life, and consequently, millions of people fled to the country in a futile bid to outrun the disease. Countless cars filled the roads out of the city, all heading to relatives’ homes, or campgrounds, or wherever else the road could take them. Panicking crowds bought up all of the fuel supplies, legitimately fearing that gasoline would soon be a rare commodity. The problem is that none of these full gas-tanks are in the city any more.
And of those cars that were in the city, looters have already taken most of the fuel and batteries.
While all of this was happening around me, the sheer speed at which the society’s infrastructure fell apart left me in awe. Once a proportion of tanker drivers and long haul truckers fell ill, a vital link in the supply chain was missing. Stores, hospitals, and gas stations all rely on short deliveries – small and frequent – and so, when these finished, everything fell apart. Within days, a third of drivers were without fuel. Subsequently, stores were empty and hospitals ran out of oxygen tanks. The news broadcasts stated that power stations should have had a twenty-day supply of fuel to keep the electricity going and the water pumping. That’s in theory anyway. In reality, we all found ourselves in a lot of trouble, very quickly. There was little water, little gas, little food, little hospital resources, and the ever threatening G9 plague. So everyone who could run, did so. The roads turned chaotic and sluggish. It was a mess, and still is.
I hunt for old cars, which I assume will be easier to siphon. The first rusting heap I find has an empty tank and spits a lungful of sickening gasoline air. But the second car I approach has some has in the tank and I manage to pour a decent amount into an empty bucket found in a snow-filled gutter.
With that success under my belt, I take stock of the food situation. I have a few assorted pieces of food in my bag, and spotting an open diner, I decide to utilize the relative comfort. I choose a stool by the coffee bar. “Service please!” I yell into the back and there’s a clatter of pans in response. A rodent scared by my voice. But things like this no longer make me jumpy.
On the stool, by the bar, I eat my cold meal — an apple and pack of peanut butter pretzels – while admiring a photo of the Sydney Opera House, framed above the coffee machines. To my left, above the cake cabinet, is another framed photograph, this time of a battleship in profile, with guns pointing proudly and radar dish spinning against the setting sun. The image brings to mind of one of the few human-interest stories shown on the news broadcasts before the electricity stopped. Somewhere in the pacific, a U.S. cargo ship was sailing without direction. The crew were healthy, they claimed in a radio broadcast, but feared to return to a potentially dangerous dock. No doubt, some of the crew would have preferred to die with their ill families but the captain had decreed that they would stay at sea for as long as it took to clear things up on land. By now, I suppose, they have all starved. Perhaps they staged a mutiny and docked down in California. Or perhaps they’re still alive, perhaps sat on a desert island eating pineapples in the sun, hoping all this will blow over. Could there be a woman amongst them? I muse on this while eating the pretzels and taking long swigs from my water bottle.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 6 (Second Half)
Here's the second part of Chapter 6. I'll begin posting Part 3 on Thursday. Enjoy!
Dave
------
6 (Continued)
I walk back along East Carson, towards the Birmingham Bridge. I’ll collect the snowmobile that Hank, James, and I abandoned on the bridge several days ago and I’ll ride it north, back to my parents’ home, in Bramble, Pennsylvania. Maybe, just maybe, there’s somebody still there.
A few other men walk along East Carson: the living dead. I pass them without making eye contact. I don’t bother to guess what they’re planning. A few of them cluster together, in groups of three or four, no doubt heading to old hideouts or other well-kept secrets.
The snow now falls hard, blustering in thick sheets, oppressive and burdensome. This flight feels like both heaven and hell swirled together in a metaphor-burdened marble cake. I’m confused and disorientated, but happy, in a way, to be free.
And ahead, the snow is gathering in virgin plots. A vast plain of white before me; a blank canvas in which to plot my journey to wherever I feel.
Twenty minutes later, I round the corner of East Carson and Brady Street and ascend to the Birmingham Bridge. My hands ache from the cold, so I pull a pair of gloves from my bag and, using my teeth and juggling the crowbar, tug them tight over my fingers.
As I arrive at the top of the shallow incline, I peer across the bridge, over the cars, to where Hank, James, and I had abandoned the snowmobile. A momentary bluster of wind clears the snow from view and ahead I can see a figure. From here, it’s only a shape, but a shape with the same green color as Hank’s ski jacket.
A few minutes later, as I approach Hank, I notice that he’s toying with the snowmobile’s engine. He’s brushed the snow from the vehicle and dropped his collection of things nearby. His hands are covered in oil. With his back to me, unaware of my approach, he swears in frustration, but I don’t catch any words though through the blustering wind.
Above me, the silent black birds have returned. They wheel in the sky, and stare with their beaded eyes as I pass below.
“Hank,” I call. He jumps slightly, and cranes his neck to catch me in the edge of his vision.
“What do you want?”
“I need the snowmobile, Hank. I’m heading up to Bramble.”
“No. No, Matt. I’m sorry.” He turns back to the engine and shouts back a few seconds later, “Leave me alone, Matt. The snowmobile’s mine.”
I watch him tooling with the engine for a while. I find myself thinking of the crowbar in my gloved hand and the reassuring weight of its cold steel.
I need to get the snowmobile and go back to my parents’ place. If they’re home, if anybody’s home, I need to be there.
Nobody has to know what I did and nobody will care.
Only the black birds will see.
Hank turns to look at me again. “You’re still here? What?” He stutters for a moment, trying to find words of adequate force. “Fuck off, Matt. It’s over, so just fuck off.” I see tears welling in his eyes.
And he turns and continues to study the engine.
He tinkers with the mechanism for a while longer, ignoring me, hoping I’ll go away.
But I don’t go away.
Nobody will care.
He reaches over the snowmobile and turns the key in the ignition. There’s a churning noise and he yells triumphantly, “Yes!”
Nobody will see. Even he’s forgotten I’m here. Only the black birds will know.
The weight of the crowbar allows the weapon to swing gracefully through the air. Falling snowflakes fill the space between the hard steel and my staring eyes. The snow looks like a beautiful white noise. A detuned TV. The curved point makes contact with Hank and he caves, crumples, and falls amongst the static. Oil covers his hands and red fills the snow and covers the crowbar, and Hank, and me. I’ve lost peripheral vision. I only exist in this immediate space and this immediate time.
Hank lies to the side and I step around him, strap my backpack to the snowmobile and climb aboard. My hands are numb and my mind is numb. My hands work of their own accord and make the engine rev, loud and sputtering. I look above me and the birds still stare, impartial, perched on trucks and wires, silent. I push them from my mind as the snowmobile turns one-hundred and eighty degrees and moves towards Forbes Avenue. I notice the blood on my coat. I crane my neck and spot Hank in the snow, now only a green clump on the ice, the same green as his snow jacket. A black-green clump becoming a black-green dot, a black-green speck, and then, as I hang left on the snowmobile, there’s nothing at all.
I feel nothing. I’m numb. But then, why are tears running down my face? Where did they come from?
Dave
------
6 (Continued)
I walk back along East Carson, towards the Birmingham Bridge. I’ll collect the snowmobile that Hank, James, and I abandoned on the bridge several days ago and I’ll ride it north, back to my parents’ home, in Bramble, Pennsylvania. Maybe, just maybe, there’s somebody still there.
A few other men walk along East Carson: the living dead. I pass them without making eye contact. I don’t bother to guess what they’re planning. A few of them cluster together, in groups of three or four, no doubt heading to old hideouts or other well-kept secrets.
The snow now falls hard, blustering in thick sheets, oppressive and burdensome. This flight feels like both heaven and hell swirled together in a metaphor-burdened marble cake. I’m confused and disorientated, but happy, in a way, to be free.
And ahead, the snow is gathering in virgin plots. A vast plain of white before me; a blank canvas in which to plot my journey to wherever I feel.
Twenty minutes later, I round the corner of East Carson and Brady Street and ascend to the Birmingham Bridge. My hands ache from the cold, so I pull a pair of gloves from my bag and, using my teeth and juggling the crowbar, tug them tight over my fingers.
As I arrive at the top of the shallow incline, I peer across the bridge, over the cars, to where Hank, James, and I had abandoned the snowmobile. A momentary bluster of wind clears the snow from view and ahead I can see a figure. From here, it’s only a shape, but a shape with the same green color as Hank’s ski jacket.
A few minutes later, as I approach Hank, I notice that he’s toying with the snowmobile’s engine. He’s brushed the snow from the vehicle and dropped his collection of things nearby. His hands are covered in oil. With his back to me, unaware of my approach, he swears in frustration, but I don’t catch any words though through the blustering wind.
Above me, the silent black birds have returned. They wheel in the sky, and stare with their beaded eyes as I pass below.
“Hank,” I call. He jumps slightly, and cranes his neck to catch me in the edge of his vision.
“What do you want?”
“I need the snowmobile, Hank. I’m heading up to Bramble.”
“No. No, Matt. I’m sorry.” He turns back to the engine and shouts back a few seconds later, “Leave me alone, Matt. The snowmobile’s mine.”
I watch him tooling with the engine for a while. I find myself thinking of the crowbar in my gloved hand and the reassuring weight of its cold steel.
I need to get the snowmobile and go back to my parents’ place. If they’re home, if anybody’s home, I need to be there.
Nobody has to know what I did and nobody will care.
Only the black birds will see.
Hank turns to look at me again. “You’re still here? What?” He stutters for a moment, trying to find words of adequate force. “Fuck off, Matt. It’s over, so just fuck off.” I see tears welling in his eyes.
And he turns and continues to study the engine.
He tinkers with the mechanism for a while longer, ignoring me, hoping I’ll go away.
But I don’t go away.
Nobody will care.
He reaches over the snowmobile and turns the key in the ignition. There’s a churning noise and he yells triumphantly, “Yes!”
Nobody will see. Even he’s forgotten I’m here. Only the black birds will know.
The weight of the crowbar allows the weapon to swing gracefully through the air. Falling snowflakes fill the space between the hard steel and my staring eyes. The snow looks like a beautiful white noise. A detuned TV. The curved point makes contact with Hank and he caves, crumples, and falls amongst the static. Oil covers his hands and red fills the snow and covers the crowbar, and Hank, and me. I’ve lost peripheral vision. I only exist in this immediate space and this immediate time.
Hank lies to the side and I step around him, strap my backpack to the snowmobile and climb aboard. My hands are numb and my mind is numb. My hands work of their own accord and make the engine rev, loud and sputtering. I look above me and the birds still stare, impartial, perched on trucks and wires, silent. I push them from my mind as the snowmobile turns one-hundred and eighty degrees and moves towards Forbes Avenue. I notice the blood on my coat. I crane my neck and spot Hank in the snow, now only a green clump on the ice, the same green as his snow jacket. A black-green clump becoming a black-green dot, a black-green speck, and then, as I hang left on the snowmobile, there’s nothing at all.
I feel nothing. I’m numb. But then, why are tears running down my face? Where did they come from?
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 6 (First Half)
I know I said I would post the entirety of Chapter 6 today, but the two halves of it are very distinct, it's vitally important to the overall narrative, and it's a fairly long chapter anyway. So I'm posting the first half today, and I'll post the second half on Sunday. As ever, if you're new here, be sure to check out Chapter 1.
Enjoy!
Dave.
--------
6
The men in Mecca have seen so much in the recent weeks that nobody is sure how to react to the disrobing of Sylvia. For many of the men here, most of the discontent in Mecca came from their conviction that this method in such madness could never work, so of course few of us are surprised when the façade of this enclave finally crumbles. Those men who were troubled by the idea of a female in control have nothing left to worry about. All those fears have gone, to be replaced by a void. A void of emotion, I know, that will soon be filled by anger and resentment and whole load of other far worse fears.
Many of the men leave in silence, with the odd snide remark to the side.
“Queer.”
“You fucking bitch.”
I can hear shouting from inside the building. The short man who instigated this trouble sits on the ground and swears to himself before stumbling off with a few allies. Time passes and most of the men fall away from the courtyard with little communication. The edges of my world crumble, yet again. I feel dizzy. How can I face these changes so many times? Will this never end?
Sylvia is weeping, sat on the hard ground, while snow falls into her hair and on her dress, soaking her as it melts and leading her to shiver in discomfort. I can still see her penis, shrunken in the freezing air, through the rip in her dress. Mascara runs down her face etching black rivers of grief.
I stand still in the worsening weather, unsure of which way to turn. I stare at those around me, who vanish into the building or over the fence. I didn’t like the idea of Mecca, but it was something. It was, at least, a vague kind of hope. That’s why I submitted to it, regardless of my feelings. I’m not sure I wanted it taken away with so little warning. Now that this safety net is gone, I find myself exactly where I was a week ago — alone. So I remain immobile in the courtyard.
“Come on,” Timothy says to me. He walks away without checking to see if I follow. I don’t, but I doubt he really cares anymore.
By now, almost everyone has left: the clusters of men previously in conversation; Sylvia’s servants; the cooks. One man remains by the courtyard’s distant fence, on his haunches, rocking backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Sylvia has pulled herself up onto a low crate where she sits, legs astride, with her genitals now covered by her dress, holding her head in her hands. There appears to be no alternative, so I sit by her side. Maybe I’ll be able to say something profound, like a closing bracket to this whole event. Unfortunately, when it comes to the crunch, I look at her sobbing and sniffing, and find no suitable words.
“All I wanted was to give these men some hope. Was that so wrong?” She says between sobs, “I know I couldn’t do much, but I could make things bearable, right?”
The ethics of her actions are too complex to understand in so short a time, so I state the obvious. “It was a false hope,” is all I say, pathetic and superfluous.
“Of course it was a false hope,” she responds. “What else can there be?” She chokes in a deep breath. “I’ve barely slept during this entire endeavor. I knew they’d find the truth eventually and I’ve expected a lynching or something. But I thought maybe by then I could create something good. Something useful.” Blood drips from her nose into her hand. “I guess I got away lucky,” she splutters.
I’m also crying. I realize I have to leave and go back to what’s left of this desolate world, alone. Then again, now that all hope is dashed, being alone is all I want.
There’s a long pause.
“My hero, you know, is Queen Victoria,” she croaks. “Does that sound lame? I’m sure it does. But you know, Queen Victoria had absolute rulership and she was adored and worshipped for it. She remained unmarried her whole life so she would never have to share her power and we remember to this day — hundreds of years later — how loved she was. And how strong. So confident and sure. Maybe this is the last day she’ll be remembered. If I die, nobody will care about her history.” She pauses, takes another deep sobbing breath, and plunges on. “I didn’t want that absolute power, you know, of course not, but can you see her strength? Against all of those odds. Her womanly force. Can you conceive of it? All men bowed to her. She faced the entire Spanish Armada without batting an eyelid, and she made a legacy, regardless of any family to follow in her footsteps.”
“You wanted to be remembered?”
“For my great legacy.”
“You couldn’t offer a legacy. You could only offer something immediate.”
She shudders in grief and refuses to respond to my criticism.
“You’re insane,” I say, but without enough conviction.
“No. It’s just that nobody understands.”
“I don’t think you understand yourself, Sylvia. You tried to make life bearable, fine, but you only made it all that much more devastating. You’ve shattered all those men, you know that?”
“You were already shattered,” she says as I stand up. Now I’m sure of my plan, what I’m going to do, and where I’m going to go. Sylvia has finally given me direction. “You were already broken,” she spits.
I walk away, into the building, passing into the hallway where men collect their things in a silent frenzy.
*
I climb the stairwell of the now eerie, silent building. The occasional sob carries down a hallway and I hear the odd footfall overhead. There are three men sat in the dining room, ever silent. One of them has his head in his hands, echoing Sylvia’s previous posture. From the stairwell window, I can see Sylvia still outside, her dress torn and her face a mess of grief.
My throat burns.
I go into my makeshift room and find James sat on the bed with an expression of disbelief. Hank’s belongings are gone.
“He picked up and left. It took him, maybe, thirty seconds, and he didn’t say a word.”
The silence between us is too long and too thick. I don’t know how we’ll ever emerge from such a silence, and then we do just that.
“So what are you going to do?” I ask.
James looks up at me. His eyes are red. He shrugs, defeated. “Well, I have to go.” He takes a deep breath, holds it for a few seconds, and exhales, trying to push the stress and anxiety out with the air from his lungs. “I wonder if Ben’s doing ok.”
I stuff my own things into my backpack and then, after a brief hesitation, take the blankets from my bed, rolling them up and fastening them to the bag’s straps. “He’ll be glad to see you. But yeah, none of us can stay, right?” My question sounds rhetorical, but it isn’t.
“No,” he replies anyway, without heart. “No.”
I heave my backpack on and give the room a final glance. James sits with his head down, surrounded by his own belongings. I notice the crowbar I’d brought from Lawrenceville and I grab that too. I never did find a gun.
“Goodbye, James.”
He keeps his head down.
I leave the building. The massive changes occurring around me leave me feeling light headed. Each step down the stairwell is a weight off my shoulders. Yes, the outside world will be hard, but I will only have to look out for myself, think only of my own feelings, and be concerned only for my own health.
Enjoy!
Dave.
--------
6
The men in Mecca have seen so much in the recent weeks that nobody is sure how to react to the disrobing of Sylvia. For many of the men here, most of the discontent in Mecca came from their conviction that this method in such madness could never work, so of course few of us are surprised when the façade of this enclave finally crumbles. Those men who were troubled by the idea of a female in control have nothing left to worry about. All those fears have gone, to be replaced by a void. A void of emotion, I know, that will soon be filled by anger and resentment and whole load of other far worse fears.
Many of the men leave in silence, with the odd snide remark to the side.
“Queer.”
“You fucking bitch.”
I can hear shouting from inside the building. The short man who instigated this trouble sits on the ground and swears to himself before stumbling off with a few allies. Time passes and most of the men fall away from the courtyard with little communication. The edges of my world crumble, yet again. I feel dizzy. How can I face these changes so many times? Will this never end?
Sylvia is weeping, sat on the hard ground, while snow falls into her hair and on her dress, soaking her as it melts and leading her to shiver in discomfort. I can still see her penis, shrunken in the freezing air, through the rip in her dress. Mascara runs down her face etching black rivers of grief.
I stand still in the worsening weather, unsure of which way to turn. I stare at those around me, who vanish into the building or over the fence. I didn’t like the idea of Mecca, but it was something. It was, at least, a vague kind of hope. That’s why I submitted to it, regardless of my feelings. I’m not sure I wanted it taken away with so little warning. Now that this safety net is gone, I find myself exactly where I was a week ago — alone. So I remain immobile in the courtyard.
“Come on,” Timothy says to me. He walks away without checking to see if I follow. I don’t, but I doubt he really cares anymore.
By now, almost everyone has left: the clusters of men previously in conversation; Sylvia’s servants; the cooks. One man remains by the courtyard’s distant fence, on his haunches, rocking backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Sylvia has pulled herself up onto a low crate where she sits, legs astride, with her genitals now covered by her dress, holding her head in her hands. There appears to be no alternative, so I sit by her side. Maybe I’ll be able to say something profound, like a closing bracket to this whole event. Unfortunately, when it comes to the crunch, I look at her sobbing and sniffing, and find no suitable words.
“All I wanted was to give these men some hope. Was that so wrong?” She says between sobs, “I know I couldn’t do much, but I could make things bearable, right?”
The ethics of her actions are too complex to understand in so short a time, so I state the obvious. “It was a false hope,” is all I say, pathetic and superfluous.
“Of course it was a false hope,” she responds. “What else can there be?” She chokes in a deep breath. “I’ve barely slept during this entire endeavor. I knew they’d find the truth eventually and I’ve expected a lynching or something. But I thought maybe by then I could create something good. Something useful.” Blood drips from her nose into her hand. “I guess I got away lucky,” she splutters.
I’m also crying. I realize I have to leave and go back to what’s left of this desolate world, alone. Then again, now that all hope is dashed, being alone is all I want.
There’s a long pause.
“My hero, you know, is Queen Victoria,” she croaks. “Does that sound lame? I’m sure it does. But you know, Queen Victoria had absolute rulership and she was adored and worshipped for it. She remained unmarried her whole life so she would never have to share her power and we remember to this day — hundreds of years later — how loved she was. And how strong. So confident and sure. Maybe this is the last day she’ll be remembered. If I die, nobody will care about her history.” She pauses, takes another deep sobbing breath, and plunges on. “I didn’t want that absolute power, you know, of course not, but can you see her strength? Against all of those odds. Her womanly force. Can you conceive of it? All men bowed to her. She faced the entire Spanish Armada without batting an eyelid, and she made a legacy, regardless of any family to follow in her footsteps.”
“You wanted to be remembered?”
“For my great legacy.”
“You couldn’t offer a legacy. You could only offer something immediate.”
She shudders in grief and refuses to respond to my criticism.
“You’re insane,” I say, but without enough conviction.
“No. It’s just that nobody understands.”
“I don’t think you understand yourself, Sylvia. You tried to make life bearable, fine, but you only made it all that much more devastating. You’ve shattered all those men, you know that?”
“You were already shattered,” she says as I stand up. Now I’m sure of my plan, what I’m going to do, and where I’m going to go. Sylvia has finally given me direction. “You were already broken,” she spits.
I walk away, into the building, passing into the hallway where men collect their things in a silent frenzy.
*
I climb the stairwell of the now eerie, silent building. The occasional sob carries down a hallway and I hear the odd footfall overhead. There are three men sat in the dining room, ever silent. One of them has his head in his hands, echoing Sylvia’s previous posture. From the stairwell window, I can see Sylvia still outside, her dress torn and her face a mess of grief.
My throat burns.
I go into my makeshift room and find James sat on the bed with an expression of disbelief. Hank’s belongings are gone.
“He picked up and left. It took him, maybe, thirty seconds, and he didn’t say a word.”
The silence between us is too long and too thick. I don’t know how we’ll ever emerge from such a silence, and then we do just that.
“So what are you going to do?” I ask.
James looks up at me. His eyes are red. He shrugs, defeated. “Well, I have to go.” He takes a deep breath, holds it for a few seconds, and exhales, trying to push the stress and anxiety out with the air from his lungs. “I wonder if Ben’s doing ok.”
I stuff my own things into my backpack and then, after a brief hesitation, take the blankets from my bed, rolling them up and fastening them to the bag’s straps. “He’ll be glad to see you. But yeah, none of us can stay, right?” My question sounds rhetorical, but it isn’t.
“No,” he replies anyway, without heart. “No.”
I heave my backpack on and give the room a final glance. James sits with his head down, surrounded by his own belongings. I notice the crowbar I’d brought from Lawrenceville and I grab that too. I never did find a gun.
“Goodbye, James.”
He keeps his head down.
I leave the building. The massive changes occurring around me leave me feeling light headed. Each step down the stairwell is a weight off my shoulders. Yes, the outside world will be hard, but I will only have to look out for myself, think only of my own feelings, and be concerned only for my own health.
Sunday, June 14, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 5
First off, congratulations to the Penguins winning the Stanley Cup.
Here's the penultimate chapter in Part 2. I'll post the final chapter on Thursday, and Part 3 will start next at the end of the week.
Enjoy!
Dave
---------
5
Over the next three days, I settle into a steady routine, hunting for supplies by day and playing poker or backgammon by night. I slowly move away from the friendships of a weary Hank and disillusioned James, and move closer to Timothy, the realist and straight talker. Yesterday, I led a truck up to Lawrenceville to collect James’, Hank’s, and my own possessions. The total that I collected barely filled a corner of the truck and took only twenty minutes for myself and Mitch, my new ever-silent work partner, to gather. Ben, the dog, was nowhere to be seen, but James has remained silent on the subject anyway. We have bigger things to worry about.
We still don’t have electricity in Mecca and the building is still colder than death. Most of the rooms now have propane heaters, but gas is strictly limited to nighttime use.
Right now, my watch reads 13:21 and thirty men congregate in the courtyard eating lunch. Mistress Sylvia sits at a central table, constructed of storage boxes, under one of the plastic shelters. Earlier, she offered a toast, “To the success of Mecca and a return on all our hard work!” Now she’s eating with three men who I can only describe as her servants.
Standing with the group of men with whom I’ve been playing poker for the past few evenings – a group that includes James on the periphery – we eat our barbecued sweet potatoes. Along with four or five other clusters of men, we try to ignore the cold, and satisfy ourselves with the heat of the food as it sits heavy in our stomachs.
Mecca has grown by eleven people over the past three days.
I’ve been in the courtyard for five minutes and the weather is fine. Cold, of course, but everywhere is cold, and the air is still and dry. Aside from the snow on the ground, standing out here is no different from standing inside Mecca: fucking freezing. Accordingly, Mistress Sylvia wears a long red coat with fur along the collar.
Soon enough a light sprinkle of snow falls from the sky and a few of the men laugh as they spot the first ice crystals in the air. In such dire situations, we have to laugh. “More of that great Pittsburgh weather for you!” Sylvia proudly announces and there are more chuckles from the gathered crowd.
In the far corner of the courtyard, her joke gets a poor reception. There’s audible anger and discontent. A short, heavy built man is raising his voice to those around him. He says something. I hear the word “fuck,” and his audience mutters and nods. Then he yells with such unexpected volume that I hop from my chair in surprise. “Fuck this! This is messed up. This just isn’t going to work,” he gestures to the middle of the courtyard, “and especially with this Sylvia running the show.” He says something else, which I miss, and the men around me turn to watch what he may do. Sylvia remains seated, still and calm. We all ask ourselves: where did this come from? “YOU!” the short man yells, and he glares at the back of Sylvia’s head. Slowly, she turns to face her provoker, ice-cold, and he screams, “FUCK YOU!”
Sylvia’s three servants have already risen from their seats in a defensive act but she remains as she was, staring back at him. “If you have a problem with this system,” she says as calm as possible, “then you’re more than welcome to address them with me, like an adult. Not with this cry-baby attitude. Otherwise, of course, you can leave.”
The short man rocks forward on his toes and contemplates moving over to her. He doesn’t. “Well yeah, I have a problem,” he says. The other men around him perch on the precipice of treacherous agreement and the safety of inactivity. But they’re safe, as Sylvia gives her sole attention to the short man and his quick machine-gun of words. “I’ve a problem with you and your whole God-damn shitty Empire. Sitting in your room, issuing orders, pushing us all around, and all the whole time you must fucking love it. Well who died and put you in charge?”
“Who—?” Sylvia pauses and tries to control her reaction. “Who?” She pauses for a long time, and then her exterior cracks, only for a moment, and she screams, red-faced, “EVERYBODY DIED AND PUT ME IN CHARGE!” Her voice is shrill and strained. “You know there’s nothing without me— and— and you know nothing about me!”
The short man rocks forwards again and finally takes a step towards her center table. “Yeah?”
“Hey, back off,” one of the servants shouts, a slim built beard who carries about as much authority as a burrito. From nowhere the short man throws a punch and several others run towards the violence, some to quell it, but more to escalate it, and there’s a sudden and unexpected chaos. I only watch, sure whose side I’m on, but unsure about this method of rebellion. Her three servants fly into the fray, concentrating on the short man, swinging fists at his head. Several times, they make contact, making him stagger backwards into the ranks of his supporters, who grab the servants and pull them into the crowd, punching them and dragging them to the ground.
Sylvia yells, “Stop it!” and tears of frustration run down her face. But before she can have any reasonable effect, the violence reaches her own body. The short angry man grabs her coat, ripping the collar and she emits a choked animal noise.
The sound makes me feel sick.
Sylvia squeezes out of her coat, to escape the choke, and slides onto the ground, to reveal an elegant ball-gown, striking in its beauty and impracticality. The gown's deep blood-red fabric is spotted with the damp falling snow, as she’s pushed out from under the cover of the plastic shelter. Amongst the chaos of fists and grabbing hands her dress is torn. The short man stands over her, grabbing her by her collar, sending fists into her face, blood exploding like fireworks into the air. Other men try to grab him, to make him stop, but he swings at their arms. I expect rape, and though the violence making me feel ill I’m paralyzed. People are grabbing at the short man from all directions, trying to pull him away, quell his sickening violence and then, as quickly as the violence began, the violence ends.
From nowhere, simultaneously across the yard, the violence ends.
Silence falls on the back yard of an old apartment building in the Southside of Pittsburgh where perhaps more men than anywhere else in the world stand gathered in awe. We all stare with ragged breath. Blood drips from various individuals, none more so than Sylvia. All eyes rest on her.
And it transpires, visible to all, that she is really a he and that Mecca is no more.
“The last great civilization falls, huh?” she laughs between globs of blood. Her voice chokes up under the weight of the tears we all feel forming, ready to burst once this shock runs its course.
Here's the penultimate chapter in Part 2. I'll post the final chapter on Thursday, and Part 3 will start next at the end of the week.
Enjoy!
Dave
---------
5
Over the next three days, I settle into a steady routine, hunting for supplies by day and playing poker or backgammon by night. I slowly move away from the friendships of a weary Hank and disillusioned James, and move closer to Timothy, the realist and straight talker. Yesterday, I led a truck up to Lawrenceville to collect James’, Hank’s, and my own possessions. The total that I collected barely filled a corner of the truck and took only twenty minutes for myself and Mitch, my new ever-silent work partner, to gather. Ben, the dog, was nowhere to be seen, but James has remained silent on the subject anyway. We have bigger things to worry about.
We still don’t have electricity in Mecca and the building is still colder than death. Most of the rooms now have propane heaters, but gas is strictly limited to nighttime use.
Right now, my watch reads 13:21 and thirty men congregate in the courtyard eating lunch. Mistress Sylvia sits at a central table, constructed of storage boxes, under one of the plastic shelters. Earlier, she offered a toast, “To the success of Mecca and a return on all our hard work!” Now she’s eating with three men who I can only describe as her servants.
Standing with the group of men with whom I’ve been playing poker for the past few evenings – a group that includes James on the periphery – we eat our barbecued sweet potatoes. Along with four or five other clusters of men, we try to ignore the cold, and satisfy ourselves with the heat of the food as it sits heavy in our stomachs.
Mecca has grown by eleven people over the past three days.
I’ve been in the courtyard for five minutes and the weather is fine. Cold, of course, but everywhere is cold, and the air is still and dry. Aside from the snow on the ground, standing out here is no different from standing inside Mecca: fucking freezing. Accordingly, Mistress Sylvia wears a long red coat with fur along the collar.
Soon enough a light sprinkle of snow falls from the sky and a few of the men laugh as they spot the first ice crystals in the air. In such dire situations, we have to laugh. “More of that great Pittsburgh weather for you!” Sylvia proudly announces and there are more chuckles from the gathered crowd.
In the far corner of the courtyard, her joke gets a poor reception. There’s audible anger and discontent. A short, heavy built man is raising his voice to those around him. He says something. I hear the word “fuck,” and his audience mutters and nods. Then he yells with such unexpected volume that I hop from my chair in surprise. “Fuck this! This is messed up. This just isn’t going to work,” he gestures to the middle of the courtyard, “and especially with this Sylvia running the show.” He says something else, which I miss, and the men around me turn to watch what he may do. Sylvia remains seated, still and calm. We all ask ourselves: where did this come from? “YOU!” the short man yells, and he glares at the back of Sylvia’s head. Slowly, she turns to face her provoker, ice-cold, and he screams, “FUCK YOU!”
Sylvia’s three servants have already risen from their seats in a defensive act but she remains as she was, staring back at him. “If you have a problem with this system,” she says as calm as possible, “then you’re more than welcome to address them with me, like an adult. Not with this cry-baby attitude. Otherwise, of course, you can leave.”
The short man rocks forward on his toes and contemplates moving over to her. He doesn’t. “Well yeah, I have a problem,” he says. The other men around him perch on the precipice of treacherous agreement and the safety of inactivity. But they’re safe, as Sylvia gives her sole attention to the short man and his quick machine-gun of words. “I’ve a problem with you and your whole God-damn shitty Empire. Sitting in your room, issuing orders, pushing us all around, and all the whole time you must fucking love it. Well who died and put you in charge?”
“Who—?” Sylvia pauses and tries to control her reaction. “Who?” She pauses for a long time, and then her exterior cracks, only for a moment, and she screams, red-faced, “EVERYBODY DIED AND PUT ME IN CHARGE!” Her voice is shrill and strained. “You know there’s nothing without me— and— and you know nothing about me!”
The short man rocks forwards again and finally takes a step towards her center table. “Yeah?”
“Hey, back off,” one of the servants shouts, a slim built beard who carries about as much authority as a burrito. From nowhere the short man throws a punch and several others run towards the violence, some to quell it, but more to escalate it, and there’s a sudden and unexpected chaos. I only watch, sure whose side I’m on, but unsure about this method of rebellion. Her three servants fly into the fray, concentrating on the short man, swinging fists at his head. Several times, they make contact, making him stagger backwards into the ranks of his supporters, who grab the servants and pull them into the crowd, punching them and dragging them to the ground.
Sylvia yells, “Stop it!” and tears of frustration run down her face. But before she can have any reasonable effect, the violence reaches her own body. The short angry man grabs her coat, ripping the collar and she emits a choked animal noise.
The sound makes me feel sick.
Sylvia squeezes out of her coat, to escape the choke, and slides onto the ground, to reveal an elegant ball-gown, striking in its beauty and impracticality. The gown's deep blood-red fabric is spotted with the damp falling snow, as she’s pushed out from under the cover of the plastic shelter. Amongst the chaos of fists and grabbing hands her dress is torn. The short man stands over her, grabbing her by her collar, sending fists into her face, blood exploding like fireworks into the air. Other men try to grab him, to make him stop, but he swings at their arms. I expect rape, and though the violence making me feel ill I’m paralyzed. People are grabbing at the short man from all directions, trying to pull him away, quell his sickening violence and then, as quickly as the violence began, the violence ends.
From nowhere, simultaneously across the yard, the violence ends.
Silence falls on the back yard of an old apartment building in the Southside of Pittsburgh where perhaps more men than anywhere else in the world stand gathered in awe. We all stare with ragged breath. Blood drips from various individuals, none more so than Sylvia. All eyes rest on her.
And it transpires, visible to all, that she is really a he and that Mecca is no more.
“The last great civilization falls, huh?” she laughs between globs of blood. Her voice chokes up under the weight of the tears we all feel forming, ready to burst once this shock runs its course.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 4
Here's chapter 4. Sorry it's a little late in the day -- I know some of you read this at work! I remember I particularly enjoyed writing this chapter. I really liked doing James' monologue near the end. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed reading it. Expect the next chapter on Sunday.
An another note, I learned yesterday that the expansion pack to the XBox's post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout 3, is to be set in Pittsburgh -- which is brilliant because I loved the old Fallout games. But Pittsburgh's no stranger to Zombies and Apocalypses -- George Romero was from the city, and many of his films were made in the area. In fact, Dawn of the Dead was filmed in the Monroeville mall (I've a great photo of myself pretending to be a zombie there), and Left 4 Dead (the video-game) is set in Allegheny county. And here I am perpetuating this great injustice! It seems so unfair, when Pittsburgh was recently voted No.1 place to live in the U.S. by The Economist.
And finally -- good luck to the Penguins tomorrow.
Dave
-----------
4
In the courtyard that night, five of us gather for poker: myself; Hank; Timothy; a young man named Ivor, with a peach-fuzz moustache; and a bearded man named Don, who waved to me across the courtyard earlier that day. Don wears thick black-framed glasses with tape wrapped around both the nose and arm.
It’s a calm night and, although it’s cold, it’s no warmer indoors, so several other clusters of men lounge around elsewhere in the courtyard. Everybody helps themselves to the various boxes of liquor and beer that have been stacked to one side. There’s a continual patter of laughter in the yard as various groups joke around. We play our games on a table underneath one of newly constructed plastic shelters. The ceilings are transparent and corrugated so that, when I look up, the clouds ripple across the sky. There are no stars visible tonight and the clouds imply we’ll experience more snow or rain before sunrise.
We’re on our fourth hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, which is the only form of poker that we all know, and I’m winning by one-hundred dollars worth of chips, though there’s no money to bet or win. We each have a pseudo fifteen-hundred and the winner will get bragging rights. We pass around joints made from the eighth of weed that I found earlier, when Hank and I searched through old apartment buildings. The etiquette in Mecca means we have to share the weed with the other groups down in the courtyard, so it doesn’t stretch far at all.
I have a Jack of spades and a ten of hearts so I call fifty dollars.
Hank calls my bet and, aware that I’m sitting amongst Mecca skeptics, I mention my earlier discussion with James, who’s currently reading in our room. I’m not sure if telling these men what he said about Sylvia is betraying his confidence or not, but then, since arriving here a day ago, I’m no longer too concerned about James’ trust. We’ve grown apart too much already. I was surprised that he opened up to me today. Our friendship was forced and sudden and it seemed to be crashing at a similar pace. When he told me about his worries, he seemed so far away. I was unable to sympathize or even formulate an adequate response. Instead, I was concerned about my own fragile place under Sylvia’s matriarchy. Right then I felt James was a stranger, and I guess in many ways he was, and still is. When James and I last spoke I was worried about the ramification of treasonous talk, but here, amongst these other strangers, I feel utterly comfortable. I guess that says a lot about the friendship between James and I.
As I recite James’ words to these men, I speak softly so that they all lean closer to listen. We can’t afford to have other people know our opinions. “He says she’s insane,” I finish.
The men look at each other, musing on James’ story. Timothy juts out his jaw, perplexed. In an attempt to look natural to the rest of the courtyard, to look like our conversation isn’t treasonous, he casually throws fifty dollars of chips onto the table.
Igor, with the peach-fuzz moustache, twitches and tries to take the controversy down a notch, though I wish he wouldn’t — I need to talk about these things. “But I think this whole situation’s insane. Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Hank concurs as the topic slips further and further away from the topic of Sylvia’s fragile mind. “There’s no normality anywhere anymore. Sylvia fits the situation. She’s normal for the situation and that’s how you survive. She has to be nuts to rule over a world gone nuts. Maybe.” He pauses and takes a breath. “There’s no such thing as normality any more.”
“I guess this can feel like normality, in a way,” I say as I fiddle with my Jack and ten, aware that the Sylvia topic is lost – Hank just played it away. Sitting here and playing a game of poker feels perfectly normal.
Tim laughs at me, but it’s not funny, and Igor calls Tim’s fifty dollars.
“You’re just drunk and stoned. You think this is anything like normality?” Tim says in the deep tones of his thick accent. “No way. We’re sat here, six strangers, near enough, playing under a plastic roof in a dead city and a dead country. This ain’t normality, man. There’s a guard with a shotgun at the entrance where we live. This ain’t normality. This attempt at normality is just your security blanket.”
We all remain quiet for a while. We agree with each other, but admitting that would be too difficult. We’re half-happy with the fiction of a security blanket.
Don raises one-hundred dollars.
I call.
Don passes me the stub of a joint, from which I take a deep drag. My head feels light as the cannabis floods my nervous system. I feel like I can’t control my arms the way I’d like to; that they always move a bit too far and a bit too fast and flail about a bit too much. I know that soon I’ll be slouching in my chair and slurring my words ever so slightly and it will feel great to relax, though eventually I’ll take a one drag too much and become sick to my stomach. I take a swig from a beer bottle to erase the burning at the back of my throat.
“I’m not surprised that James said what he did,” Hank says as he calls the one-hundred. “In all honesty, I’m more surprised that more people here aren’t saying the same things. And on top of that I’m surprised to see that so few of us have cracked up at all.” He pauses to think. “But, I mean, barring that event—” he stops. Clearly, people are cracking.
“Yeah, we know man,” adds Tim as he folds from the game. “We should all be fucked up by now. I was seeing guys on those streets totally fucking cracking. Totally insane. Being ripped from normality like this is enough to make anybody crack. We’re all doin’ alright, but how does anyone make sense of that?”
Nobody answers Tim’s question and he creases his eyebrows while he considers the answer himself. There is a call, a check, and the river is dealt. There’s a short silence as we figure out our hands. My cards haven’t worked out, so I bluff and raise one-hundred.
“How long do you guys think you’ll be able to stay here?” Don asks. I’m sure we’ve all been thinking the same question for some time now. We all have our own answers. Hank, Timothy, Ivor, and I, look at each other, judging one another’s reaction to the question.
Rain spatters on the plastic roof and dark, damp spots appear on the asphalt. I watch another group of men stroll towards a second shelter, laughing at a joke. One of their group carries a guitar and settles down with it on his knee to tune it in.
“What else do we have?” Hank asks in a miserable tone. “If this falls apart—”
Silence.
“I think the shit we’re left with when all this falls apart is well understood by all,” says Tim.
Ivor and I nod together.
The rain gets heavier, rattles on the roof and runs down the corrugations to trickle off the sides.
Tim folds when faced with my raise. Ivor laughs and shows his cards, a five and a nine. “This isn’t going anywhere for me,” he smiles.
Don chuckles too. “The money’s yours,” he says to me. “Well done, you bastard.” He throws his cards in.
The guitarist under the next shelter strums a few chords as Ivor shuffles and deals the cards. Then the guitarist picks strings for a while, hums along, and attempts to remember the progression of a song.
*
After two more reckless games, I’m down to three hundred and twenty five dollars. I never claimed to be good at poker. Through the last two games, the rain has intensified. Now, huge sheets of water thunder against the plastic above our heads.
Under the rain, four poker companions and I voice our doubts concerning Mecca. James’ has tired of his reading and has come to the courtyard to sit with us, though he doesn’t play. I feel bad for neglecting to ask him to join the game, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits on a crate of canned food and chips in on the conversation every now and then. He’s the most vehement and outspoken detractor of Mistress Sylvia, and he relates to us the day’s events, including his meeting with her, with a particular venom. Unlike the rest of our group, he doesn’t temper the volume of his voice, much to our gathered concern.
“I was down at the rear of the courtyard, there,” he points to a stack of scrap metal and engines, “helping some of the other guys fix a generator, like I said. It’s a piece of junk, but we replaced the broken parts, tightened the gears and fired the thing up. It appeared to work fine, so we hooked it into the mains, and the lights in the building flickered on.” Ivor nods because he remembers the lights. “Cheers were coming from all the windows while the generator is making a huge fucking amount of noise. Then a fan belt snaps, a gear breaks, and that’s it. A day’s work for forty seconds of lighting. Ha! But Mistress Sylvia comes out to congratulate us personally, like she’s the queen or something, visiting her, her, her fucking subjects. It’s supposed to be a morale boost, I guess, because we were all pissed that it didn’t work better. We failed, but she says, ‘it was a big step forward and a step closer to a new civilization.’ Then she tells us that we are the guys who are going to bind Mecca together. That makes sense, sure. Us and the guys who are plumbing, because, she says, we can provide all the modern conveniences. Yeah, that’s all fair enough.
“But then she goes on. She says something like, ‘Mecca will be the promised land. With electricity we’ll contact other groups and there’ll be exponential growth,’ and it all gets a bit weird. She says something like ‘as sovereign mother’ or some shit ‘I will be the glue that holds us all together. Our group will be remembered as the founders of this new and glorious civilization,’ and then she refers to herself as the Earth Mother too and starts going on and on. It’s fucking crazy though. Her head tilted back and her eyes glazed. She says that her men, all of us, will stand by the pleats of her skirt as the pillars of civilization, and all I can think is, ‘What!’ This is all supposed to be a compliment for our hard work, I guess, but it becomes this wild fantasy of hers about her kingdom and her rulership. Only we’re all too weirded out and a bit too scared to say anything.”
We all laugh, nervous and high pitched.
“Ok, the Mecca plan is all a good idea on the practical side. How can you refute it? Without it we have nothing and no hope, but, but she, our ‘mother,’ she’s completely insane. She’s losing it.”
James looks at us, eyes wild, looking for acknowledgement that he’s made a sufficient impact. The rain continues to pour.
I’ve had very few encounters with Mistress Sylvia. In reality, all I know about her Mecca program is that the sharp separation that exists between her followers and her skeptics might be precisely what tears things apart. Unlike any other almost cultish group that may have existed prior to the outbreak of G9, here we have no choice but to play a part. So, some of the men here haven’t been correctly brainwashed yet. Even if we’re free thinkers, we have no choice, for practical reasons, other than to live here and follow her program. And now I realize that any group of men will come to resent the absolute leadership of a woman. We’ll call her insane and mutter rumors; we’ll do anything in an attempt to undermine her leadership, or at least prop up our own masculinity. I’m sure some of these men think Mistress Sylvia should be plain old Sylvia (I certainly do), but some of these men must think she should be nothing more that a breeding slave, reproducing for the sake of humanity. I know some of the men think that.
Resentment is building and a storm will come, regardless of what we may want. Yesterdays’ shooting was precursor to whatever is coming; that much is sure. Something is brewing from deep within this group, something hateful and resentful, and I’m sure that when it erupts nobody will be safe from its wrath.
A storm is most certainly on its way.
The raindrops pound down overhead.
An another note, I learned yesterday that the expansion pack to the XBox's post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout 3, is to be set in Pittsburgh -- which is brilliant because I loved the old Fallout games. But Pittsburgh's no stranger to Zombies and Apocalypses -- George Romero was from the city, and many of his films were made in the area. In fact, Dawn of the Dead was filmed in the Monroeville mall (I've a great photo of myself pretending to be a zombie there), and Left 4 Dead (the video-game) is set in Allegheny county. And here I am perpetuating this great injustice! It seems so unfair, when Pittsburgh was recently voted No.1 place to live in the U.S. by The Economist.
And finally -- good luck to the Penguins tomorrow.
Dave
-----------
4
In the courtyard that night, five of us gather for poker: myself; Hank; Timothy; a young man named Ivor, with a peach-fuzz moustache; and a bearded man named Don, who waved to me across the courtyard earlier that day. Don wears thick black-framed glasses with tape wrapped around both the nose and arm.
It’s a calm night and, although it’s cold, it’s no warmer indoors, so several other clusters of men lounge around elsewhere in the courtyard. Everybody helps themselves to the various boxes of liquor and beer that have been stacked to one side. There’s a continual patter of laughter in the yard as various groups joke around. We play our games on a table underneath one of newly constructed plastic shelters. The ceilings are transparent and corrugated so that, when I look up, the clouds ripple across the sky. There are no stars visible tonight and the clouds imply we’ll experience more snow or rain before sunrise.
We’re on our fourth hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, which is the only form of poker that we all know, and I’m winning by one-hundred dollars worth of chips, though there’s no money to bet or win. We each have a pseudo fifteen-hundred and the winner will get bragging rights. We pass around joints made from the eighth of weed that I found earlier, when Hank and I searched through old apartment buildings. The etiquette in Mecca means we have to share the weed with the other groups down in the courtyard, so it doesn’t stretch far at all.
I have a Jack of spades and a ten of hearts so I call fifty dollars.
Hank calls my bet and, aware that I’m sitting amongst Mecca skeptics, I mention my earlier discussion with James, who’s currently reading in our room. I’m not sure if telling these men what he said about Sylvia is betraying his confidence or not, but then, since arriving here a day ago, I’m no longer too concerned about James’ trust. We’ve grown apart too much already. I was surprised that he opened up to me today. Our friendship was forced and sudden and it seemed to be crashing at a similar pace. When he told me about his worries, he seemed so far away. I was unable to sympathize or even formulate an adequate response. Instead, I was concerned about my own fragile place under Sylvia’s matriarchy. Right then I felt James was a stranger, and I guess in many ways he was, and still is. When James and I last spoke I was worried about the ramification of treasonous talk, but here, amongst these other strangers, I feel utterly comfortable. I guess that says a lot about the friendship between James and I.
As I recite James’ words to these men, I speak softly so that they all lean closer to listen. We can’t afford to have other people know our opinions. “He says she’s insane,” I finish.
The men look at each other, musing on James’ story. Timothy juts out his jaw, perplexed. In an attempt to look natural to the rest of the courtyard, to look like our conversation isn’t treasonous, he casually throws fifty dollars of chips onto the table.
Igor, with the peach-fuzz moustache, twitches and tries to take the controversy down a notch, though I wish he wouldn’t — I need to talk about these things. “But I think this whole situation’s insane. Don’t you?”
“Yeah,” Hank concurs as the topic slips further and further away from the topic of Sylvia’s fragile mind. “There’s no normality anywhere anymore. Sylvia fits the situation. She’s normal for the situation and that’s how you survive. She has to be nuts to rule over a world gone nuts. Maybe.” He pauses and takes a breath. “There’s no such thing as normality any more.”
“I guess this can feel like normality, in a way,” I say as I fiddle with my Jack and ten, aware that the Sylvia topic is lost – Hank just played it away. Sitting here and playing a game of poker feels perfectly normal.
Tim laughs at me, but it’s not funny, and Igor calls Tim’s fifty dollars.
“You’re just drunk and stoned. You think this is anything like normality?” Tim says in the deep tones of his thick accent. “No way. We’re sat here, six strangers, near enough, playing under a plastic roof in a dead city and a dead country. This ain’t normality, man. There’s a guard with a shotgun at the entrance where we live. This ain’t normality. This attempt at normality is just your security blanket.”
We all remain quiet for a while. We agree with each other, but admitting that would be too difficult. We’re half-happy with the fiction of a security blanket.
Don raises one-hundred dollars.
I call.
Don passes me the stub of a joint, from which I take a deep drag. My head feels light as the cannabis floods my nervous system. I feel like I can’t control my arms the way I’d like to; that they always move a bit too far and a bit too fast and flail about a bit too much. I know that soon I’ll be slouching in my chair and slurring my words ever so slightly and it will feel great to relax, though eventually I’ll take a one drag too much and become sick to my stomach. I take a swig from a beer bottle to erase the burning at the back of my throat.
“I’m not surprised that James said what he did,” Hank says as he calls the one-hundred. “In all honesty, I’m more surprised that more people here aren’t saying the same things. And on top of that I’m surprised to see that so few of us have cracked up at all.” He pauses to think. “But, I mean, barring that event—” he stops. Clearly, people are cracking.
“Yeah, we know man,” adds Tim as he folds from the game. “We should all be fucked up by now. I was seeing guys on those streets totally fucking cracking. Totally insane. Being ripped from normality like this is enough to make anybody crack. We’re all doin’ alright, but how does anyone make sense of that?”
Nobody answers Tim’s question and he creases his eyebrows while he considers the answer himself. There is a call, a check, and the river is dealt. There’s a short silence as we figure out our hands. My cards haven’t worked out, so I bluff and raise one-hundred.
“How long do you guys think you’ll be able to stay here?” Don asks. I’m sure we’ve all been thinking the same question for some time now. We all have our own answers. Hank, Timothy, Ivor, and I, look at each other, judging one another’s reaction to the question.
Rain spatters on the plastic roof and dark, damp spots appear on the asphalt. I watch another group of men stroll towards a second shelter, laughing at a joke. One of their group carries a guitar and settles down with it on his knee to tune it in.
“What else do we have?” Hank asks in a miserable tone. “If this falls apart—”
Silence.
“I think the shit we’re left with when all this falls apart is well understood by all,” says Tim.
Ivor and I nod together.
The rain gets heavier, rattles on the roof and runs down the corrugations to trickle off the sides.
Tim folds when faced with my raise. Ivor laughs and shows his cards, a five and a nine. “This isn’t going anywhere for me,” he smiles.
Don chuckles too. “The money’s yours,” he says to me. “Well done, you bastard.” He throws his cards in.
The guitarist under the next shelter strums a few chords as Ivor shuffles and deals the cards. Then the guitarist picks strings for a while, hums along, and attempts to remember the progression of a song.
*
After two more reckless games, I’m down to three hundred and twenty five dollars. I never claimed to be good at poker. Through the last two games, the rain has intensified. Now, huge sheets of water thunder against the plastic above our heads.
Under the rain, four poker companions and I voice our doubts concerning Mecca. James’ has tired of his reading and has come to the courtyard to sit with us, though he doesn’t play. I feel bad for neglecting to ask him to join the game, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits on a crate of canned food and chips in on the conversation every now and then. He’s the most vehement and outspoken detractor of Mistress Sylvia, and he relates to us the day’s events, including his meeting with her, with a particular venom. Unlike the rest of our group, he doesn’t temper the volume of his voice, much to our gathered concern.
“I was down at the rear of the courtyard, there,” he points to a stack of scrap metal and engines, “helping some of the other guys fix a generator, like I said. It’s a piece of junk, but we replaced the broken parts, tightened the gears and fired the thing up. It appeared to work fine, so we hooked it into the mains, and the lights in the building flickered on.” Ivor nods because he remembers the lights. “Cheers were coming from all the windows while the generator is making a huge fucking amount of noise. Then a fan belt snaps, a gear breaks, and that’s it. A day’s work for forty seconds of lighting. Ha! But Mistress Sylvia comes out to congratulate us personally, like she’s the queen or something, visiting her, her, her fucking subjects. It’s supposed to be a morale boost, I guess, because we were all pissed that it didn’t work better. We failed, but she says, ‘it was a big step forward and a step closer to a new civilization.’ Then she tells us that we are the guys who are going to bind Mecca together. That makes sense, sure. Us and the guys who are plumbing, because, she says, we can provide all the modern conveniences. Yeah, that’s all fair enough.
“But then she goes on. She says something like, ‘Mecca will be the promised land. With electricity we’ll contact other groups and there’ll be exponential growth,’ and it all gets a bit weird. She says something like ‘as sovereign mother’ or some shit ‘I will be the glue that holds us all together. Our group will be remembered as the founders of this new and glorious civilization,’ and then she refers to herself as the Earth Mother too and starts going on and on. It’s fucking crazy though. Her head tilted back and her eyes glazed. She says that her men, all of us, will stand by the pleats of her skirt as the pillars of civilization, and all I can think is, ‘What!’ This is all supposed to be a compliment for our hard work, I guess, but it becomes this wild fantasy of hers about her kingdom and her rulership. Only we’re all too weirded out and a bit too scared to say anything.”
We all laugh, nervous and high pitched.
“Ok, the Mecca plan is all a good idea on the practical side. How can you refute it? Without it we have nothing and no hope, but, but she, our ‘mother,’ she’s completely insane. She’s losing it.”
James looks at us, eyes wild, looking for acknowledgement that he’s made a sufficient impact. The rain continues to pour.
I’ve had very few encounters with Mistress Sylvia. In reality, all I know about her Mecca program is that the sharp separation that exists between her followers and her skeptics might be precisely what tears things apart. Unlike any other almost cultish group that may have existed prior to the outbreak of G9, here we have no choice but to play a part. So, some of the men here haven’t been correctly brainwashed yet. Even if we’re free thinkers, we have no choice, for practical reasons, other than to live here and follow her program. And now I realize that any group of men will come to resent the absolute leadership of a woman. We’ll call her insane and mutter rumors; we’ll do anything in an attempt to undermine her leadership, or at least prop up our own masculinity. I’m sure some of these men think Mistress Sylvia should be plain old Sylvia (I certainly do), but some of these men must think she should be nothing more that a breeding slave, reproducing for the sake of humanity. I know some of the men think that.
Resentment is building and a storm will come, regardless of what we may want. Yesterdays’ shooting was precursor to whatever is coming; that much is sure. Something is brewing from deep within this group, something hateful and resentful, and I’m sure that when it erupts nobody will be safe from its wrath.
A storm is most certainly on its way.
The raindrops pound down overhead.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Pittsburgh Images
Reader, Euan has just been kind enough to send me a cover he recently designed for A Pittsburgh Storm. I absolutely love it. I love the colours, and I love the way it effortlessly portrays the tone and pace of the book.Thanks Euan!
The image was taken by Mark Knobil, and comes from here. It is licensed Creative Commons.
And while you're checking those images out, I heartily recommend you look at some more of Mark Knobil's Pittsburgh photos. Here are some fantastic ones taken in Polish Hill.
All the best,
Dave
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 3 (Continued)
Here's the second part of Chapter 3. I'll post Chapter 4 on Thursday. Don't forget you can just buy the whole ebook straight away for $1.25, using the links on the side.
Dave
---------
Back on the street below, we meet with the other members of our salvage team. Six of us climb, with our bags, onto the back of the truck that brought us here, while two more individuals climb into the cabin. As the truck edges through the cluttered streets of Southside, I ask the men around me about their stories — where they’ve come from, what they did, where they’re going. What I want to know is how these men feel about Mistress Sylvia and if they believe that Mecca can deliver on its promises. The problem is that I know that some of these people worship the Mistress and that they may consider my questioning treasonous, so I have to veil my enquiries in innocent conversation. I want to scope out the scale of opinions. I know from the meeting the previous night that there is some discontent, but that many of the men are too scared to voice this. If they get thrown out of Mecca, what do they do then?
Oliver, a thin man from Garfield, answers my prompt with a voice so deep it defies his body’s physical proportions. He tells me how he also saw the fireworks and came to Mecca because of a lack of other options. He admits to a feeling of bewilderment. “Everything seems too ordered at Mecca. It’s all too ordered when everything else around us is in such a mess. Like, it’s just so out of place.” As he says this, he looks around at the others in the truck, and tries to gauge their reactions. He’s said nothing traitorous yet, but he’s on the boundary of doing so. He skillfully invites voices of disagreement into the conversation, to prevent himself from going too far with his criticism.
But before that can happen, a friend of Oliver’s rushes to an unnecessary defense. “We ain’t complaining about the Mecca, you know. Things like Mecca are exactly what we need — we need a woman around. It’s that simple. We were unnerved is all, when we first arrived here.”
Myself, Hank, and an older man in glasses exchange uneasy glances. Most of us have a problem with the Mecca setup. Maybe this is an inherent sexism of ours, instilled by the society that raised us. Maybe this uneasiness is only a culmination of the desperate emotions that stem from the magnitude of bizarre events in the last few weeks. Now we can’t trust anything, so we suspect everything. And we’re always on the very edge of our seats.
The sixth man on the back of the truck, the redhead who directed the salvage operation, flushes annoyance. Initially I can’t tell if he’s expressing anger, unease, or embarrassment, but then he yells at us. “You know, you guys are fucking ungrateful. This is indignant! Mistress Sylvia is the only thing I can see right now that can save us — save us men — and it’s obvious why and it’s pretty fucking rich that you’ll all sit there and disagree.”
“I said that!” Oliver’s friend, a Caribbean man named Timothy, replies with disgust.
The thin man, Oliver, looks down, shamed by the redhead’s shaking stare, and the old man looks to Timothy, urging him to lead our defiant argument.
But the redhead shrugs off Timothy’s reply and resumes his tirade. “When Mistress Sylvia is our only hope, we do whatever the fuck she tells us to do. If that means calling her ‘Mistress’ — and I know that’s what you guys resent — then we fucking do it, else— else what are you doing here? Get out of the Mecca if you don’t like it and give yourself to the fucking dogs. Fuck off into the streets on your own. You’ll get shot down or starve, or if you’re really fucking lucky you’ll die an old man, with nothing, and alone, and that will be it.”
Timothy starts to yell back but stutters and halts. We’re relying on Mistress Sylvia right now. That much is undeniable. Forgive the cliché, but an act of rebellion would be biting the hand that feeds.
The aged man in glasses overcomes his bout of nerves and attempts to calm the situation with his paced and studied tone. “I’m already an old man, now with nothing, ok? So you calm down. Of course these guys are uneasy.” He waves his hand at us and stares the readhead square in the eye. “There’s one woman. One woman hoping to save everybody. And yeah there might be others elsewhere, but right now there’s just one, and she has an army of thirty, forty, maybe fifty men, all doing what she says. There’s nothing wrong with that, I mean nothing wrong with her being in charge, I’m not sexist but,” (but people only ever say I’m not sexist but, or I’m not racist but, before they go ahead and say something sexist, racist, classist or any other -ist you can think of) “this just isn’t right, ok? Having a woman in charge. We’re all uncomfortable, we’re all uneasy, and we’re all, well, outright scared. So relax, will you? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re all just scared about the future and our place in it. So just relax.”
There’s an awkward pause and then the redhead yells, far too loud and out of place, “No. Maybe you guys need to relax!”
The old man sighs. “Fine, ok,” he says. “Yeah— fine.” He stares out of the truck at the passing buildings, signaling an end to the conversation.
And so we sit in silence for the rest of the journey, watching the desolate, ruined streets roll by. The redhead silently fumes to himself and swears occasionally under his breath. We pass a smashed up antique store, stripped of goods. I’m amazed at the madness that gripped the city while we petered on the precipice of the abyss. I have to wonder at what use people thought they would find for antique Black Panther badges and Royal Dolton bone china tea sets.
*
Ten minutes later, the truck arrives back at Mecca. During our absence, men have cleared snow from the road outside the building, so that the chains on the truck’s wheels clank on the asphalt. Three men stand outside the building to meet our search party, and point to an alleyway where we can offload the supplies we’ve collected.
“Way to go!” one of the men calls as we drive by waving our overloaded bags.
We hand our things down from the back of the truck and proceed through the rear entrance of the building. Mistress Sylvia has stationed a guard at this door. He sits on a high stool, smiling at us, and rests a single-barreled shotgun across his lap. It appears that after yesterday’s bloodshed Mistress Sylvia has reassessed her open door policy.
The redhead walks into Mecca ahead of us, with two other men from the truck’s cab walking by his side. The four skeptics and I follow several yards behind.
“Gentlemen,” the guard says with a pleasant nod.
We pass by and head down the hallway into the courtyard, which is surrounded by the Mecca building on three sides and has a chain-link fence on the final length, bordering a narrow alleyway. Some more men are busy shoveling the snow from the courtyard while others build a collection of open-sided shelters with corrugated plastic roofs.
We dump the remains of our collected supplies in the yard and return indoors. Hank and I are about to walk upstairs, back to the common room, but Timothy grabs my wrist. “We’re having a poker game tonight,” he says, and gestures to another man at the rear of the yard. The man waves towards me on Timothy’s cue and then returns to his building task. “We were thinking you might like to join in. You and your friend of course.”
“That sounds great,” I reply. I’m flattered by Timothy’s open gesture of friendship. I guess that after the argument in the truck, he now knows he’s found allies in this desperate situation. “We’re picking up our things from Lawrenceville tonight,” I tell him, “so we could join in once we get back.”
“Ah, come on. That could take hours. You’re things aren’t going anywhere, so get them tomorrow.”
I agree with him. Hank, James, and I brought all of our essentials with us already. Our Lawrenceville hideout only contains food, books, keepsakes, and other items of no immediate importance. Besides the dog, that is. I tell Timothy that I’ll bring Hank with me, ten-thirty sharp. Ben, the dog, will be fine for one more night and James will just have to suck it up. He’s been acting like a dick lately anyway.
*
I leave Hank in the common room and return to our bedroom to find James sat on the edge of his bed.
“Long time, no see,” I joke, but with too little mirth. “How’s your day been?”
“I’ve been fixing some wiring. Fixing lights. Trying to get a generator to work.” He looks up with heavy eyes. “My dad taught me to do all that shit when I was in high school. It shouldn’t have taken long to do the repairs but the generator we have is fucked up and the guys say they can’t find another. Would you believe how many car batteries were stolen when the trouble broke out? I didn’t even see anyone doing that.”
“Yeah. We found a stash of them today.”
James looks down and I stare at the crown of his head. His hair, like my own, is filthy and matted.
He sighs and gives up on the small talk. “I hate it here, man. This utopia of— of testosterone and muscles and all this fucking useless work. It isn’t my style at all. This all kinda feels sick and futile, to tell the truth.” He drops silent for a split second before he throws me further news. “Oh shit, you know, I spoke to Sylvia today, man. She came to give us a little encouragement speech, but— Jeez, she’s fucking cracked.”
“I—”
“Really, man. She’s seems to think that she’s this, this— holy virgin mother of man or some insane shit. She said she’s ‘redeeming us from damnation’ — her words, not mine. This was after she went on about how pleased she was at the promise of electricity because it’s the first rung on the ladder back to civilization. It’s the next big step. But she reckons she’s the whole fucking deal. A real fucking nutbag. It scared me. It scared me that she seemed so insane in her fantasy and yet she’s running the whole show with all these men under her and they do what she says at the drop of a hat. It’s sick, man. It’s like a king of fascism. I’m scared though, man, and I think I really need to get out of here. But then I know that if I do that I’m fucked anyway.” His speech drops to a whisper. “Alone, dead, and fucked. It’s all the fucking same.”
He’s silent for a long time. I’m at a loss for words. This is all too sudden. Too many things have happened too quickly.
“This is Hell,” he splutters.
Dave
---------
Back on the street below, we meet with the other members of our salvage team. Six of us climb, with our bags, onto the back of the truck that brought us here, while two more individuals climb into the cabin. As the truck edges through the cluttered streets of Southside, I ask the men around me about their stories — where they’ve come from, what they did, where they’re going. What I want to know is how these men feel about Mistress Sylvia and if they believe that Mecca can deliver on its promises. The problem is that I know that some of these people worship the Mistress and that they may consider my questioning treasonous, so I have to veil my enquiries in innocent conversation. I want to scope out the scale of opinions. I know from the meeting the previous night that there is some discontent, but that many of the men are too scared to voice this. If they get thrown out of Mecca, what do they do then?
Oliver, a thin man from Garfield, answers my prompt with a voice so deep it defies his body’s physical proportions. He tells me how he also saw the fireworks and came to Mecca because of a lack of other options. He admits to a feeling of bewilderment. “Everything seems too ordered at Mecca. It’s all too ordered when everything else around us is in such a mess. Like, it’s just so out of place.” As he says this, he looks around at the others in the truck, and tries to gauge their reactions. He’s said nothing traitorous yet, but he’s on the boundary of doing so. He skillfully invites voices of disagreement into the conversation, to prevent himself from going too far with his criticism.
But before that can happen, a friend of Oliver’s rushes to an unnecessary defense. “We ain’t complaining about the Mecca, you know. Things like Mecca are exactly what we need — we need a woman around. It’s that simple. We were unnerved is all, when we first arrived here.”
Myself, Hank, and an older man in glasses exchange uneasy glances. Most of us have a problem with the Mecca setup. Maybe this is an inherent sexism of ours, instilled by the society that raised us. Maybe this uneasiness is only a culmination of the desperate emotions that stem from the magnitude of bizarre events in the last few weeks. Now we can’t trust anything, so we suspect everything. And we’re always on the very edge of our seats.
The sixth man on the back of the truck, the redhead who directed the salvage operation, flushes annoyance. Initially I can’t tell if he’s expressing anger, unease, or embarrassment, but then he yells at us. “You know, you guys are fucking ungrateful. This is indignant! Mistress Sylvia is the only thing I can see right now that can save us — save us men — and it’s obvious why and it’s pretty fucking rich that you’ll all sit there and disagree.”
“I said that!” Oliver’s friend, a Caribbean man named Timothy, replies with disgust.
The thin man, Oliver, looks down, shamed by the redhead’s shaking stare, and the old man looks to Timothy, urging him to lead our defiant argument.
But the redhead shrugs off Timothy’s reply and resumes his tirade. “When Mistress Sylvia is our only hope, we do whatever the fuck she tells us to do. If that means calling her ‘Mistress’ — and I know that’s what you guys resent — then we fucking do it, else— else what are you doing here? Get out of the Mecca if you don’t like it and give yourself to the fucking dogs. Fuck off into the streets on your own. You’ll get shot down or starve, or if you’re really fucking lucky you’ll die an old man, with nothing, and alone, and that will be it.”
Timothy starts to yell back but stutters and halts. We’re relying on Mistress Sylvia right now. That much is undeniable. Forgive the cliché, but an act of rebellion would be biting the hand that feeds.
The aged man in glasses overcomes his bout of nerves and attempts to calm the situation with his paced and studied tone. “I’m already an old man, now with nothing, ok? So you calm down. Of course these guys are uneasy.” He waves his hand at us and stares the readhead square in the eye. “There’s one woman. One woman hoping to save everybody. And yeah there might be others elsewhere, but right now there’s just one, and she has an army of thirty, forty, maybe fifty men, all doing what she says. There’s nothing wrong with that, I mean nothing wrong with her being in charge, I’m not sexist but,” (but people only ever say I’m not sexist but, or I’m not racist but, before they go ahead and say something sexist, racist, classist or any other -ist you can think of) “this just isn’t right, ok? Having a woman in charge. We’re all uncomfortable, we’re all uneasy, and we’re all, well, outright scared. So relax, will you? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re all just scared about the future and our place in it. So just relax.”
There’s an awkward pause and then the redhead yells, far too loud and out of place, “No. Maybe you guys need to relax!”
The old man sighs. “Fine, ok,” he says. “Yeah— fine.” He stares out of the truck at the passing buildings, signaling an end to the conversation.
And so we sit in silence for the rest of the journey, watching the desolate, ruined streets roll by. The redhead silently fumes to himself and swears occasionally under his breath. We pass a smashed up antique store, stripped of goods. I’m amazed at the madness that gripped the city while we petered on the precipice of the abyss. I have to wonder at what use people thought they would find for antique Black Panther badges and Royal Dolton bone china tea sets.
*
Ten minutes later, the truck arrives back at Mecca. During our absence, men have cleared snow from the road outside the building, so that the chains on the truck’s wheels clank on the asphalt. Three men stand outside the building to meet our search party, and point to an alleyway where we can offload the supplies we’ve collected.
“Way to go!” one of the men calls as we drive by waving our overloaded bags.
We hand our things down from the back of the truck and proceed through the rear entrance of the building. Mistress Sylvia has stationed a guard at this door. He sits on a high stool, smiling at us, and rests a single-barreled shotgun across his lap. It appears that after yesterday’s bloodshed Mistress Sylvia has reassessed her open door policy.
The redhead walks into Mecca ahead of us, with two other men from the truck’s cab walking by his side. The four skeptics and I follow several yards behind.
“Gentlemen,” the guard says with a pleasant nod.
We pass by and head down the hallway into the courtyard, which is surrounded by the Mecca building on three sides and has a chain-link fence on the final length, bordering a narrow alleyway. Some more men are busy shoveling the snow from the courtyard while others build a collection of open-sided shelters with corrugated plastic roofs.
We dump the remains of our collected supplies in the yard and return indoors. Hank and I are about to walk upstairs, back to the common room, but Timothy grabs my wrist. “We’re having a poker game tonight,” he says, and gestures to another man at the rear of the yard. The man waves towards me on Timothy’s cue and then returns to his building task. “We were thinking you might like to join in. You and your friend of course.”
“That sounds great,” I reply. I’m flattered by Timothy’s open gesture of friendship. I guess that after the argument in the truck, he now knows he’s found allies in this desperate situation. “We’re picking up our things from Lawrenceville tonight,” I tell him, “so we could join in once we get back.”
“Ah, come on. That could take hours. You’re things aren’t going anywhere, so get them tomorrow.”
I agree with him. Hank, James, and I brought all of our essentials with us already. Our Lawrenceville hideout only contains food, books, keepsakes, and other items of no immediate importance. Besides the dog, that is. I tell Timothy that I’ll bring Hank with me, ten-thirty sharp. Ben, the dog, will be fine for one more night and James will just have to suck it up. He’s been acting like a dick lately anyway.
*
I leave Hank in the common room and return to our bedroom to find James sat on the edge of his bed.
“Long time, no see,” I joke, but with too little mirth. “How’s your day been?”
“I’ve been fixing some wiring. Fixing lights. Trying to get a generator to work.” He looks up with heavy eyes. “My dad taught me to do all that shit when I was in high school. It shouldn’t have taken long to do the repairs but the generator we have is fucked up and the guys say they can’t find another. Would you believe how many car batteries were stolen when the trouble broke out? I didn’t even see anyone doing that.”
“Yeah. We found a stash of them today.”
James looks down and I stare at the crown of his head. His hair, like my own, is filthy and matted.
He sighs and gives up on the small talk. “I hate it here, man. This utopia of— of testosterone and muscles and all this fucking useless work. It isn’t my style at all. This all kinda feels sick and futile, to tell the truth.” He drops silent for a split second before he throws me further news. “Oh shit, you know, I spoke to Sylvia today, man. She came to give us a little encouragement speech, but— Jeez, she’s fucking cracked.”
“I—”
“Really, man. She’s seems to think that she’s this, this— holy virgin mother of man or some insane shit. She said she’s ‘redeeming us from damnation’ — her words, not mine. This was after she went on about how pleased she was at the promise of electricity because it’s the first rung on the ladder back to civilization. It’s the next big step. But she reckons she’s the whole fucking deal. A real fucking nutbag. It scared me. It scared me that she seemed so insane in her fantasy and yet she’s running the whole show with all these men under her and they do what she says at the drop of a hat. It’s sick, man. It’s like a king of fascism. I’m scared though, man, and I think I really need to get out of here. But then I know that if I do that I’m fucked anyway.” His speech drops to a whisper. “Alone, dead, and fucked. It’s all the fucking same.”
He’s silent for a long time. I’m at a loss for words. This is all too sudden. Too many things have happened too quickly.
“This is Hell,” he splutters.
Saturday, June 6, 2009
Woo! New Edition, New Price
I've just pushed through a new edition of Pittsburgh Storm. It fixes various grammatical issues (because I'm a doofus) and incorporates the new cover. To celebrate, I've reduced the price massively.
You can now buy the paperback for $6.25 or the ebook (which is compatible with Kindle) for $1.25. Get it now from Lulu (paperback, ebook, Kindle), or Smashwords (if you're a bit weird about the format you want -- for Palm Pilot, Stanza reader, and so on).
With the ebook you're not even paying 1 cent a page. How can you beat that? All you'll get that fuzzy feeling for supporting independant publishing.
Second half of Part 2, Chapter 3, tomorrow.
Enjoy your weekend,
Dave
EDIT: Oh yeah, and if you buy the paperback, I'll send you the ebook for free in the format of your choice.
You can now buy the paperback for $6.25 or the ebook (which is compatible with Kindle) for $1.25. Get it now from Lulu (paperback, ebook, Kindle), or Smashwords (if you're a bit weird about the format you want -- for Palm Pilot, Stanza reader, and so on).
With the ebook you're not even paying 1 cent a page. How can you beat that? All you'll get that fuzzy feeling for supporting independant publishing.
Second half of Part 2, Chapter 3, tomorrow.
Enjoy your weekend,
Dave
EDIT: Oh yeah, and if you buy the paperback, I'll send you the ebook for free in the format of your choice.
Friday, June 5, 2009
New Cover
Some changes are underway in the commercial side of A Pittsburgh Storm. For starters, there's a new cover. The previous (ugly) one was made with a "cover wizard" as a stand in. Here's my new proposal.
I'm not settled on it completely yet. I'd like to get some feedback first. If I hear good responses, I'll change the official one in a few days time. Comments? Criticism? Send it all my way.
Dave
I'm not settled on it completely yet. I'd like to get some feedback first. If I hear good responses, I'll change the official one in a few days time. Comments? Criticism? Send it all my way.
Dave
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Part 2, Chapter 3
Part 2, Chapter 3 is in two parts again. I'll post the second part on Sunday. Sorry about the delay with getting this posted. Enjoy it. Be sure to leave me any comments you may have.
As always, if this is your first time here, start at Part 1.
Dave
-------
3
After the next morning’s breakfast, a large man, who introduces himself as Jack, assigns the three of us with work details. In a group of five others, which includes Hank, I have to conduct “reconnaissance and salvaging” along the Southside. They give me this task because I lack experience in many other practical skills. I’ve only ever been a student and an occasional employee in a coffee shop. As for Hank, he used to work in a loans office, doing paperwork for people who wanted to buy cars. Jack hands a note to Hank and I, signed by Mistress Sylvia, stating that we are to return to Lawrenceville and collect our things later that evening. This, she writes, is necessary for our own morale, if nothing else.
As soon as we get the order from Jack, he ushers our group out of Mecca, and onto the back of an open top truck, which will take us west along the length of Southside.
We drive through the ice and snow and then spend the remainder of the daylight searching through stores and apartment buildings in turn, looking for any provisions, or items of use, and loading them into the filthy vehicle, which drives back and forth to Mecca with its precious cargo. I wonder what James is doing; he received his work detail as we were leaving so he could be anywhere doing anything by now. When we disclosed our skills to Jack, James was able to list a whole host of valuable traits: carpentry, electronics, and plumbing, among others.
We conduct the searches in pairs. Hank and I work together, and, late in the day, approach yet another apartment building assigned to us. It looks similar to my old place in Oakland, composed of the same brown brick construction. Our red-haired group leader reminds us, “take your time. Get clothes and food, maybe books. But food is our priority.” Then he takes a group into a building across the street.
The large metal doors at the front of the building are smashed open, hanging off their hinges an impressive display of strength.
Inside the building, the air is stagnant. There’s an odd smell, like cat-shit in an old litter tray. Hank looks at me and grimaces. “We’ll work from the top down, huh?”
“Sure,” I reply and I push ahead of him to climb the first flight of stairs.
The smell gets stronger as we ascend to the second floor. There, we find a young woman’s body, lying face down. I double take. Somebody has smeared feces on the wall behind the woman. Hank gags and my own stomach lurches.
We hold our jacket collars over our noses and turn the girl over with the tips of our shoes. Dried blood covers her torso. The plague didn’t kill this girl — this is far too gruesome. There’s no other blood in the hallway either, so someone must have carried her here. As for the shit covered walls — fuck, who knows what that’s all about?
“Oh Jeez,” Hank says. “Oh fuck.”
I’m lost for words.
*
But there’s nothing we can do about the body. There’s no killer left to catch, so I make a note of the scene in our logbook and Hank continues up the stairs. Before I follow, I take one last glance at the blood-covered girl. She must be the same age as me. I think of photographs in my back pocket of Karen Spellman and Emily Jacobs — both dead. This body is too real, too immediate, too graphic a depiction of this new world. It reminds me too much of the people who were once in my life. My brothers and sister. My parents. My friends. A lump forms in my throat and my eyes sting. Hank spots that I’m lingering, descends the stairs and places his hand on my shoulder.
This girl, murdered, is the catalyst for a million terrible emotions to float to the surface of my mind.
I shudder under the weight of Hank’s hand. My eyes burn. I try to keep everything deep down, so I can get by each day, but this girl lays crumpled, disgusting, on the floor. She shows me how futile my efforts at repression are.
Hank tries to show me an expression of compassion but instead he looks worried. We’re all masking our emotions and an outbreak of reality would spread and explode though us all. It would manifest as weakness. We’d be crippled in our sorrow. We’d lose everything.
So I try to compose myself. I turn from Hank, his hand slips back to his side, and I climb the next flight of stairs.
*
Hank and I search several more apartments, grab canned food, cigarettes, alcohol, even a small chunk of cannabis I find in a coat pocket, and we load our new acquisitions into our backpacks. Eventually we tire of rummaging through the remains of the dead and we decide to climb onto the building’s rooftop to survey the late afternoon city.
At the top of the stairwell, the roof-access door is unlocked and propped open with a brick. There’s nothing on the roof except a collection of lonely flowerpots. Beyond these, we can see across the Monongahela River and to the high-rises of Downtown. We stroll across the roof and pause by the edge, the cityscape sprawled out ahead.
“I still can’t believe it,” Hank says. “I just can’t believe what has happened.”
This is a history we will spend our whole lives running from. Running from bodies in hallways and those once full streets now devoid of life. Running from our own loneliness and the insanity that may be only moments away.
Other than our own voices, there’s barely a sound in the entire city. Occasionally we hear another team, a few buildings to our left, clanking around as they conduct their own search. It sounds like they’re dropping steel pans down a stairwell. My throat feels tight because I’ve said so little in the past few hours.
“It’s like a dream, man,” Hank continues. “A strange, surreal dream and I still expect to wake up in a moment. You know? Like I’m going to snap out of it, wake up, and go to work again after breakfast and a shower. And I’ll hate my job, pushing buttons, loosening my tie, calling up some client who I couldn’t give a fuck about, maybe flirting with the girl in the photocopy room.” He sighs. “What’s going on, man? That woman down there— When did all this happen? How did everything turn so quick, like—?”
We remain silent. I notice how cold it’s become and how the wind has picked up, blowing into my coat sleeves. We look towards the dead towers of Downtown and Hank sighs again, a deep sigh from the base of his chest, and then he shudders with a chill.
In an office building across the river, a tower of the PPG complex, too distant to see the details, an individual is moving at an open window. He moves back and forth, a black shadow. Hank and I both notice the slight movement at the same time. Back and forth, and then struggling with something, dragging something and pushing something. Then a large object falls from the window, a desk maybe, and it drops twenty or thirty floors to the ground. As the object falls the figure yells, “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU!” but from this distance, though the words are distinct, the yelling is only an angry dying whimper.
I make a note in the logbook.
As always, if this is your first time here, start at Part 1.
Dave
-------
3
After the next morning’s breakfast, a large man, who introduces himself as Jack, assigns the three of us with work details. In a group of five others, which includes Hank, I have to conduct “reconnaissance and salvaging” along the Southside. They give me this task because I lack experience in many other practical skills. I’ve only ever been a student and an occasional employee in a coffee shop. As for Hank, he used to work in a loans office, doing paperwork for people who wanted to buy cars. Jack hands a note to Hank and I, signed by Mistress Sylvia, stating that we are to return to Lawrenceville and collect our things later that evening. This, she writes, is necessary for our own morale, if nothing else.
As soon as we get the order from Jack, he ushers our group out of Mecca, and onto the back of an open top truck, which will take us west along the length of Southside.
We drive through the ice and snow and then spend the remainder of the daylight searching through stores and apartment buildings in turn, looking for any provisions, or items of use, and loading them into the filthy vehicle, which drives back and forth to Mecca with its precious cargo. I wonder what James is doing; he received his work detail as we were leaving so he could be anywhere doing anything by now. When we disclosed our skills to Jack, James was able to list a whole host of valuable traits: carpentry, electronics, and plumbing, among others.
We conduct the searches in pairs. Hank and I work together, and, late in the day, approach yet another apartment building assigned to us. It looks similar to my old place in Oakland, composed of the same brown brick construction. Our red-haired group leader reminds us, “take your time. Get clothes and food, maybe books. But food is our priority.” Then he takes a group into a building across the street.
The large metal doors at the front of the building are smashed open, hanging off their hinges an impressive display of strength.
Inside the building, the air is stagnant. There’s an odd smell, like cat-shit in an old litter tray. Hank looks at me and grimaces. “We’ll work from the top down, huh?”
“Sure,” I reply and I push ahead of him to climb the first flight of stairs.
The smell gets stronger as we ascend to the second floor. There, we find a young woman’s body, lying face down. I double take. Somebody has smeared feces on the wall behind the woman. Hank gags and my own stomach lurches.
We hold our jacket collars over our noses and turn the girl over with the tips of our shoes. Dried blood covers her torso. The plague didn’t kill this girl — this is far too gruesome. There’s no other blood in the hallway either, so someone must have carried her here. As for the shit covered walls — fuck, who knows what that’s all about?
“Oh Jeez,” Hank says. “Oh fuck.”
I’m lost for words.
*
But there’s nothing we can do about the body. There’s no killer left to catch, so I make a note of the scene in our logbook and Hank continues up the stairs. Before I follow, I take one last glance at the blood-covered girl. She must be the same age as me. I think of photographs in my back pocket of Karen Spellman and Emily Jacobs — both dead. This body is too real, too immediate, too graphic a depiction of this new world. It reminds me too much of the people who were once in my life. My brothers and sister. My parents. My friends. A lump forms in my throat and my eyes sting. Hank spots that I’m lingering, descends the stairs and places his hand on my shoulder.
This girl, murdered, is the catalyst for a million terrible emotions to float to the surface of my mind.
I shudder under the weight of Hank’s hand. My eyes burn. I try to keep everything deep down, so I can get by each day, but this girl lays crumpled, disgusting, on the floor. She shows me how futile my efforts at repression are.
Hank tries to show me an expression of compassion but instead he looks worried. We’re all masking our emotions and an outbreak of reality would spread and explode though us all. It would manifest as weakness. We’d be crippled in our sorrow. We’d lose everything.
So I try to compose myself. I turn from Hank, his hand slips back to his side, and I climb the next flight of stairs.
*
Hank and I search several more apartments, grab canned food, cigarettes, alcohol, even a small chunk of cannabis I find in a coat pocket, and we load our new acquisitions into our backpacks. Eventually we tire of rummaging through the remains of the dead and we decide to climb onto the building’s rooftop to survey the late afternoon city.
At the top of the stairwell, the roof-access door is unlocked and propped open with a brick. There’s nothing on the roof except a collection of lonely flowerpots. Beyond these, we can see across the Monongahela River and to the high-rises of Downtown. We stroll across the roof and pause by the edge, the cityscape sprawled out ahead.
“I still can’t believe it,” Hank says. “I just can’t believe what has happened.”
This is a history we will spend our whole lives running from. Running from bodies in hallways and those once full streets now devoid of life. Running from our own loneliness and the insanity that may be only moments away.
Other than our own voices, there’s barely a sound in the entire city. Occasionally we hear another team, a few buildings to our left, clanking around as they conduct their own search. It sounds like they’re dropping steel pans down a stairwell. My throat feels tight because I’ve said so little in the past few hours.
“It’s like a dream, man,” Hank continues. “A strange, surreal dream and I still expect to wake up in a moment. You know? Like I’m going to snap out of it, wake up, and go to work again after breakfast and a shower. And I’ll hate my job, pushing buttons, loosening my tie, calling up some client who I couldn’t give a fuck about, maybe flirting with the girl in the photocopy room.” He sighs. “What’s going on, man? That woman down there— When did all this happen? How did everything turn so quick, like—?”
We remain silent. I notice how cold it’s become and how the wind has picked up, blowing into my coat sleeves. We look towards the dead towers of Downtown and Hank sighs again, a deep sigh from the base of his chest, and then he shudders with a chill.
In an office building across the river, a tower of the PPG complex, too distant to see the details, an individual is moving at an open window. He moves back and forth, a black shadow. Hank and I both notice the slight movement at the same time. Back and forth, and then struggling with something, dragging something and pushing something. Then a large object falls from the window, a desk maybe, and it drops twenty or thirty floors to the ground. As the object falls the figure yells, “FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU, FUCK YOU!” but from this distance, though the words are distinct, the yelling is only an angry dying whimper.
I make a note in the logbook.
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