Grants Pass (25 page)

Margie looked at the top of the
stairs, started walking towards them. There was a man-shaped inkblot standing
there. Tears welled in her eyes, bleeding the ink from her soul. It had all
been an illusion. It wasn’t real, nothing was real. Her hope — the ink — was
toying with her mind.

“
Whoa, lady,
are you all right?”

A strong hand touched her shoulder,
and Margie froze. The ink wasn’t physical. Looking up, she gasped. There was a
man, with the sun behind him.
He was real
.

But he didn’t say anything.

“
I thought I
was insane; that you were a figment of my imagination.”

“
I’m real
all right,” he said.

He turned her around, towards the
station, out of the sun. He had a weathered face, with dark hair and prominent,
thick eyebrows. Dark, like ink. But his eyes were safe; they didn’t hold lies,
they weren’t blue or red or black. They were brown, honest brown.

Something seemed to bloom within her
chest, “I’m not crazy?”

He grinned and the world seemed to
brighten. Margie brushed her tears — the poisoning ink — away and felt alive.
The ink was fleeing from the new light in her soul.

“
I can’t
vouch for that,” he chuckled.

“
And you’re
willing to extend that invite I heard on the radio? Knowing I’m a possible
nutter?”

“
Don’t
stress about it now. We’ll learn if you’re really crazy in time.” He gently put
a hand on her shoulder and began leading her down the steps.

His hand was warm, warmer than the
sun’s teasing light. “Have you ever heard of a girl called Kayley? She made
this internet post about what she’d do if the end of the world came. Gave me
the idea to set up a community where we could try and rebuild the world...”

Afterword

I’ve always been a fan of
post-apocalyptic novels and stories. What would the world be like, if humanity
was all but destroyed? How would we survive?

Then Jennifer came to Morrigan Books
with the
Grants Pass
anthology. I fell in love with the concept
immediately. I’d just seen
I am Legend
, and quite a few of these stories
really evoked that sense of isolation and fear from the movie (despite the very
different scenarios).

Both concepts got me thinking.

When I wrote
Ink Blots
, I
couldn’t help but remember those two situations. I wanted to show what solitude
can do to a person. Especially someone trapped in a rather poorly populated
country, one that is incredibly isolated and very far from the candle flame of
hope.

Humans often crave ‘quiet time’ (I
know I do); but what if that was all you had? How would you cope?

Black Heart, White Mourning

Jay Lake

DAY ZERO

I
tried
to write this all before. I know I done that. More than once. Every time, I am
wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid
stupid stupid.

Everybody’s dead. I don’t mind so
much. They’re quiet now. At first, I thought zombies were going to get me. How
many dead people can fit into a Cap Metro bus anyway? They all died like they
got somewhere to go. Rushing, afraid.

I live like I got nowhere to go.
Rushing, afraid.

Dr. Macushla told me to write it all
down. That was back before everybody died. She’s dead, too. Her phone stopped
ringing a long time ago. When I call I just get a quiet noise, clickie-click
like when the CIA is listening in.

I still phone her up sometimes and
talk to the clickie-click. Like it was her. I always used to think therapy was
stupid. I know what Grams said, I know what the judge said, but it was always
stupid. “How do you feel about that, Louella?” “And how does
that
make
you feel, Louella?” “What did the fires heal, Louella?”

These days I know therapy ain’t
stupid. Now that I ain’t got it no more. But Dr. Macushla’s clickie-click is
there when I call her number, so I tell it all about the things I seen and
done. Like the little white dog I saw in the street yesterday. I ain’t seen a
dog in two months, on account of they all died or ate each other or run off or
something. So I seen this little white dog all shaggy and muddy which goes
running through the gutter like it has somewhere to go and I follow it.

I got food, never will run out with
all of Austin dead so fast people didn’t have time to burn the grocery stores.
(Beef jerky and Hostess snowballs last forever). Maybe it wants food. Finally
it stops and lets me come close, then I whisper sweet things like I used to
whisper to the matches before Dr. Macushla cured me, then I show it some jerky
then it bites me then I kick the little fucker then it cries and bites me
again, then I stomp it.

Ok, I lied. I didn’t stomp the dog.
I just cried til it ran away.

I know you ain’t supposed to hurt
people or animals or nothing. Except the Black Death hurt us all, so bad we’ll
never get better, so those rules don’t matter no more.

Once someone told me white is the color
of mourning in China. Like they wear white to funerals and black to weddings, I
guess. So maybe the dog was in mourning or a ghost or something.

It took me a while to clean my boots
good after.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid
stupid stupid.

Dr. Macushla’s clickie-click tells
me all nice how I ain’t stupid. Like she used to tell me herself in that little
office with the flowered carpet. I tell her about this dog and lie about what I
done to the dog, then I lie about lying about the dog. I can hear her nose
wrinkling like she does when she knows I ain’t being all truthful, then she
asks me about the fire again.

People say fire is red, or orange,
but fire is black. Really. Go look at a burned up house. You don’t see no red,
do you? Black char, black ash, black smoke. It’s just red for a minute, the way
people are just pink for a minute, then when they’re dead they’re all gray and
black and blue and that’s how they stay. When fire is gone it’s all black, too.

Ashes are the ghosts of fire.

So I’m going to try to write this
down again. Maybe this time it won’t get lost or the fire won’t sneak up on my
pages. I’m pasting ruled copy paper inside an old phone book so no one will
know it’s a journal. ‘Cause an old phone book is so useful, I guess.

Tonight I’m going to drive a
Porsche. I found a good one with not too many stains on the driver seat after I
dumped the crusty, mummified woman out. And cars burn so nice when you’re done
with them.

DAY ZERO PLUS ONE

I saw the Guy again today. I think
he checks out my burning cars. I put them all in a row on the overpass from
Mopac to 183, so they are already in the sky before I set them on fire. I’m
like an Indian with smoke signals. And you can see halfway across town from up
there, when the weather’s good.

So the Guy comes and watches
sometimes. He leaves me presents along the line of burned up cars. Well,
someone does, but the Guy is the only person I run into more than once. I know
there’s some church people living down by the river in the old Magnolia Cafe.
They put notes around town, painted on bed sheets and tablecloths to hang from
bridges and power lines.

“
JOIN US.
FOOD, SAFETY, MEDECINE.”

I don’t believe that stuff. I don’t
need it anyway. I ain’t afraid of coyotes, and there’s nothing bigger here that
can bite me. The other stuff that bothers me a lot I tell to Dr. Macushla’s
clickie-click, and her ghost makes it go away.

Plus I don’t trust no one who can’t
spell. I keep a dictionary with my phone book on account of wanting to keep
trusting myself.

They got other notes, too.

“
JESUS STILL
LOVES YOU.”

“
THE WORLD
IS NOT OVER.”

Which just proves they’re idiots. Of
course the world is over. God just ain’t turned out the lights yet.

The Guy ain’t one of them. He’s
about my age, maybe he was in college when the Black Death came. He always
wears this Longhorn hoodie, and I’ll bet he found a store full of them because
he’s always clean when I see him. And finding a store full of Longhorn hoodies
in Austin wouldn’t take a
genieus
genius.

Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid
stupid stupid.

That’s how I know the presents come
from him. They’re always stuck inside some Longhorn bullshit. Like who cares
about a football team that’s all dead and got no one to play but other dead
football teams?

Sometimes he leaves me food, like something
special maybe he found around town. Hershey bars. A jar of runny peanut butter
that I finally reckoned was foreign food sauce. Sometimes he leaves me a nice
hat, or gloves. It’s coming on the fall here, and even Texas can be cold.

Not that I can’t find this stuff for
myself easy enough. Austin’s a big, empty place, and even I couldn’t burn it
all down. He’s cute about the gifts, though.

Today I see the Guy and he’s kind of
leaning on the bridge rail down by my second BMW. That was 2010 750il, a big
blue one that went real fast and the inside smelled like a shoe store with all
the leather and oil smells. No one had died in it, but the keys were in a purse
on the ground beside it, which I figured meant someone had dragged the lady
away a long time before I found the car.

It went up in flames good, too. I
opened one hundred and forty four cans of Sterno from the H.E.B. grocery store
and set them around the inside of the car in puddles of camping gas. I always
set fire to them with the engine running. That seems fair, like they have a
fighting chance. Cars with pop-up headlights are best, because they wink at you
while they’re dying, but it’s also lot of fun to burn a big pile of some
yuppie’s money.

There’s the Guy by my 750il, and he
smiles at me all shy like.

I ain’t dangerous, everybody knows
that. Long as you don’t get under my boots, and there’s no fire talking to me.
I’m a big pussy otherwise. In high school the guys knew this. About my pussy, I
mean. I’d let them
fuck
do me if they’d let me put out cigarettes on
their backs and stuff. You’d be amazed how many guys go for that.

But now I take better care of
myself. I don’t smoke no more, I burn cars instead of jocks, and there’s no one
touches me but me. Dr. Macushla is proud.

Still, sometimes it’s good to see
another person who ain’t got a shotgun or a Bible ready to come after me with.
So I give him a little smile, the kind that says “hey” even if I don’t mean it.
I swipe a glance at my boots to see if there’s no white fur or nothing on them.
Then I hunker down by my gold Cadillac Escalade pickup to see what he’s going
to do.

After a few minutes, he kind of
waddles toward me, coming halfway between my 750il and my special edition Saab.
“Hey,” he says.

The wind is all chilly and plucking
at me with a whining sound, but his words carry just fine. I had just talked to
Dr. Macushla the day before, so my voice is still ok, even in the weather.
“Hey,” I say back. I rock on my heels and wish I had a pack of cigarettes.

He’d better not bite me, that’s all
I am thinking.

The Guy reaches into the belly
pocket of his hoodie and real careful takes something out. I ain’t afraid of no
guns, either. If my time comes, I can’t stop it. And who’d kill me? No one owns
these cars any more, and there’s plenty of everything for everyone. It will all
rot and rust and blow away long before we can use it up.

It don’t matter. I
appreciete
appreciate his being careful.

He’s got something skinny wrapped in
a pale green paper. He skitters it hard toward me, to get the package going up
the slope of the highway deck between us. It’s wrapped in twine, and the paper
is clean, like he just been looting an Office Depot or something.

I crabwalk toward his present and
pick it up carefully. It takes me a moment to get the twine off. When I look up
again, he’s jogging down the ramp toward Mopac. With the old highway behind
him, the Guy turns and waves. I can see his smile, even from fifty yards away.

Fuck him if he brings a present and
doesn’t want to stay for the date. Not like I had any cigarettes to use on him
anyway.

Then I realize the present he has
given me.

It’s a stick of dynamite, wrapped in
detonator cord. A little box of blasting caps is duct taped to one end.

Oh, man.

Fire talks to me, not explosions.
It’s the flames, and the ashes, and the power to transform. I am whole inside
where everything else withers. That’s what Dr. Macushla says.

But blowing shit up is
COOL
.

The paper’s about to blow away. I
don’t like to litter, so I grab at it. The inside part has a little poster on
it, with a headline reading, “The Grants Pass Hoax!!!”

I tucked the scrap inside the ruins
of the Escalade and begin the serious business of thinking through what to blow
up. Gas station? Bridge pillar? Shopping mall entrance? I’ll have to hit a book
store and read up on blasting safety, so I don’t take off my hand or something.

The Guy is my new boyfriend. I know
this now. Pretty soon I’ll get a chance to show him what that really means.

DAY ZERO PLUS FOUR

Still keeping the journal. It’s only
a phone book. Those are everywhere. No more Internet, you want to look
something up, it’s the best way. Maybe this one will stick. Not like Dr.
Macushla or my social worker is going to read it this time around.

I ain’t seen the Guy since he gave
me the dynamite. Dr. Macushla thinks this is good, that I need to take my time
with strangers. She reminds me about the dog.

I’m feeling kind of bad about that,
so I’ve started raiding white sheets and table cloths — there’s plenty up here
in north Austin, so the church people must get theirs for banners from some
other part of town — and whenever I find a body in my way, I cover it with
white. I like to think of it as a Chinese funeral.

I’ve burned three more cars, but
didn’t want to use the dynamite on them. That would be wrong. Destructive.

Most cars won’t start anyway, unless
they’re a stick and you can get them going along a hill. A lot of them have bad
tires now. When I really want a car that ain’t in the right place or is an
automatic, I have a battery rig bungeed to a hand truck. I keep it charged up
from other cars before I burn them up on the bridge, so I can use it to jump a
new car. But that thing is a pain in the ass to haul around.

And when I do, they don’t always
catch. I figure after another wet winter, there will be too much water in the
gas tanks, and the gas will be too stale. Already is, half the time. Maybe I’ll
set wildfires next summer.

For now, I’m not done with my bridge
of cars. These three latest were a Dodge Viper — I can’t never tell the year on
those without looking at the plate under the hood — along with a really sweet
1975 Cadillac Eldorado convertible, and a pimped out 2009 Mercedes SL550. Each
of them was a pleasure in their own way. There’s a couple of stretches of Mopac
where I can hit well over a hundred before I have to slow down to weave through
the wrecks and abandoned cars.

There were two dead ladies in the
back of the Eldorado, their dried-up bodies gray haired with rotting silk
Sunday-go-to-church dresses on, curled together like they’d climbed in there to
die. Them I laid out side by side and did a Chinese funeral on. Maybe I’ll burn
bodies when I run out of cars, but people smell funny when they go up.

Well, live people do. I don’t
suppose everybody who’s been dead for a year and half will. I never did tell
Dr. Macushla how I know that about burning people, and the judge didn’t have
enough evidence to blame me for certain, or it would have been a lot worse than
therapy for me, back before the Black Plague.