Pariah (21 page)

That’s who I look like
, Abe mused.
A Jewish Gabby Hayes. Well, not after I shave off this soup strainer. Oh, I can’t wait.
He leaned on the windowsill and his smile faded, his stomach soured. From this same vantage point he’d watched this apartment’s previous tenant, Paolo, get devoured down below.

Abe hoped Mona could remove that stigma from this empty dwelling.

The sun was setting and although there was plenty of food in the building, Ellen couldn’t stop herself from looking out the window every few minutes. This wasn’t about food, anyway. If anything, at this moment having a full stomach just stoked her agita.

“You’re gonna wear a groove into the floor,” Alan said, in a poor attempt to break the tension.

“I’m just worried, okay? Am I allowed to be worried? She left hours ago and it’s almost dark. Maybe something happened to her. Maybe she isn’t immune and it was some fluke and we sent her out there and now she’s dead. And if that’s the case then it’s all our fault and we’re responsible for sending a young girl to her death.”

Alan opened his mouth to say something and then shut it. He’d already paid lip service to Ellen’s anxiety and it had done no good. It was troubling that Mona had been gone for the better part of the day. He’d posited several plausible scenarios. It was possible that several items on the list had proven more difficult to procure than others and that Mona was traipsing all around town in an attempt to accommodate every request. It was also possible that she had
forgotten how to find her way back, even though she had neatly printed the address of the building in big block letters on the list. Maybe she lost the list. It was imaginable that she had gotten to one of her destinations and gotten jammed up by the zombies—
but that she was all right
. She was just temporarily waylaid and would be back soon. For Ellen’s sake he had to keep the propositions upbeat.

But it was also quite reasonable to assume that Mona had been devoured.

Ellen’s eyes darted back and forth from the street below to the sky above, both growing darker and more ominous. She wound her hair around her fingers and chewed the ends. Alan again attempted levity by suggesting she’d get split ends doing that but Ellen just looked at him like he was an idiot. Alan sat there internally reciting the names of hair products and quoting lines from TV commercials.
“If you don’t look good, we don’t look good.” Vidal Sassoon. Pantene Pro-V. Paul Mitchell. L’Oreal. What the hell was the one with those stupid commercials where girls would rub it into their scalps in public and semipublic places? And for all intents and purposes they’d be having noisy orgasms? Then they’d emerge, from like the toilet on an airplane, tousling their shimmering manes and everyone would look at them with lust and envy? What was that stuff? Some herbal something? Maybe Mona should pick up some of that. Ellen could do with some shiny locks. What kind of thinking is this? Yesterday there’s no food. All that matters is some clean, drinkable water and food that will sustain the organism for another twenty-four hours. Now it’s “Ellen could use a nice shampoo.” I must be out of my friggin’ gourd.

“Seriously, Ellen, I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Oh really? You can say that authoritatively? You know that for a fact do you? How interesting. Because, see, the way I see it, none of us knows a damned thing right now and for all we know chunks of her are being digested—if those things even digest. I mean, do
they? Do they eat and shit and breathe? What do they do besides stumble around and eat us when they can? They sure made short work of Mike. They gobbled him down like no tomorrow. But are there piles of zombie scat out there composed of my husband? Are there? We don’t know. I don’t know. None of us knows anything!”

Should I get up and hug her?
Alan wondered. When he’d gotten into fights in the past with women—various girlfriends and one ex-wife—after all the sour words and recriminations and accusations and
you did this
and
you did that
it always came down to something simple like she just needed a hug and a kiss. Then the situation would calm down and laughter would come and then maybe, in the best of times, they’d make love or at least have sex. Was this one of those occasions where a hug was the answer? Alan got up and gently placed his arms around Ellen’s shoulders.

“What?
What?
You want sex now? What the hell is
wrong
with you?”

“I don’t. I don’t want sex,” Alan stammered. “I just thought maybe a hug would . . .” Why bother finishing the thought? He withdrew his arms and turned to resume his place on the couch.

“Where are you going? I didn’t say I didn’t want to be hugged. I just . . . I’m just freaking out.” She shot another glance out the window. “Maybe you should fuck me right about now.”

“What?”

“Do I stutter? Maybe you should fuck me. Now.”

“But this wasn’t about sex, honest. I swear. I wasn’t being . . .” Was she toying with him?

“
Just fuck me
. I need to be penetrated. I need to have something tearing my mind from Mona. But don’t think about Mona while we’re doing it. I know she’s healthy and young and I’m not. Well, I’m young, but you know what I mean. Her body versus mine. Don’t fantasize about her. Or don’t think about her being torn limb from limb like chicken. You won’t get an erection from a
thought like that. Maybe Eddie would, but Christ, I don’t want to think about what gets Eddie off.”

Ellen marched into the kitchen, shucked off her baggy army-surplus shorts and cotton undies, grabbed the counter and pushed her ass out at him. “Do it,” she commanded. Normally a take-charge woman was a turn-on, but this was a lot of pressure combined with deeply troubling extenuating circumstances. Alan dropped his pants and massaged into being a serviceable if slightly spongy erection. “Don’t be gentle. Don’t be slow,” Ellen ordered. Such hard words. Such hard angles. Though he didn’t want to think about Mona, he did think about the food. Food would soon inflate everything back to normal.

Alan followed Ellen’s edicts and pounded away. She gritted her teeth and bucked against his pelvis, meeting each thrust with equal force. Alan thought about stacking china and how delicate porcelain was. He thought about building model kits as a boy, then dropping rocks on them or blowing them up with firecrackers. He hoped their bones were up to this punishment. It had been a while since he’d run out of vitamins. How was his calcium? How was Ellen’s? They should have added a good multivitamin to the shopping list. And Jesus, lots of items from the pharmacy. What were they thinking? Just food and batteries? They’d been discussing keeping it to necessities. What could be more necessary than vitamins and headache remedies? Some pink bismuth. And not store-brand. Pepto Bismol. Or Pepcid AC! Some antidiarrheal. Oh yeah, that’s hot stuff. That’s the stuff of a
Penthouse
letter. Why not just start contemplating osteoporosis? Or scoliosis? Or any other bone-wrecking -osis?

“I want you to come inside me,” Ellen snarled, thrashing her head back and forth. This was very odd. This wasn’t a hate fuck. Alan had only experienced that phenomenon once or twice in his past, especially with his ex-wife. She’d stare up at him, eyes squinted in concentration, slowly and with great deliberation intoning, “
Fuck
my cunt,
” over and over. This wasn’t like that exactly, but it was certainly angsty. And very aggressive. Ellen snapped her head back and her hair whipped across his face.

“Clairol,” he said, slapping his forehead. “Clairol Herbal Essence!”

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said, feeling lava pump into his face. He smacked her ass and pumped harder to throw her off the scent of his wandering mind. After several more minutes of violent hammering he obliged her request. His knees and thighs immediately turned to jelly and he sank to the floor. Ellen slumped beside him. She pressed her head against his chest and murmured, “Hold me.”

It always came down to a hug.

And as he ran his fingers through her oily hair he silently mouthed,
Clairol Herbal Essence
.

It had been two weeks earlier that Ellen had teased Alan as he trudged up the stairs, Bataan Death March-style, with case after case of Kirkland bottled water. Nothing had really happened yet—certainly not on the level into which it would blossom—but Alan’s girlfriend, Tammy, had convinced him that preparedness wasn’t anything to scoff at. So there he’d been, doing the lion’s share of lugging, wishing for an elevator.

“All you need are some camouflage fatigues and a headband,” Ellen said with a smirk as he approached her on the landing. Her infant daughter, Emily, was suckling a full, barely veiled breast. Though Alan found nothing sexy about nursing—lactation was not a kink he found appealing—he was enamored of Ellen Swenson’s boobs and any peek was welcome. Tammy, tart-tongued and efficient, was all nipple and no tit, her chest a smooth plane of milky
white skin dotted with two pencil eraser-size pink protrusions. Though not in love with Tammy, Alan was fond of her, but he craved suppleness and Ellen had it. He blinked away his unchaste thoughts and refocused on Ellen’s eyes.

“Huh?” Despite the temperature outside, his face was awash in perspiration.

“You and the gal pal are really kicking into survivalist mode.”

Alan eased the case to the ground with a thud, panting. “Better safe than sorry. That’s Tammy’s philosophy.”

“It’s just some infected rats,” Ellen countered. “They’ll be dead in no time. You’ve seen all the open manholes everywhere.”

“Yeah, I know. Between the rats and the noxious fumes, driving back with the supplies was a bitch.”

“You keep a car in the city?” With all that was going on,
that
was what Ellen marveled at. It made Alan smile. These were the real concerns of full-blooded New Yorkers. Not rats biting and infecting commuters down in the subway and pedestrians on the street. Not crews in hazmat suits spelunking the city’s subterranean infrastructure for the last two weeks, pumping who knows what kind of toxic gas down there in hopes of obliterating the ferocious rodents. Not people either stumbling around hacking in each other’s faces looking like death warmed over or sporting surgical masks. Where you parked:
that
was a thing at which to marvel.

“Tammy keeps it in Brooklyn. It’s her car.”

“Ah,” Ellen said. “
Brooklyn
. Remember when Manhattan was the place to be? Now it’s Brooklyn.”

“Now it’s Brooklyn,” Alan agreed.

That exchange had been two weeks ago. Now, Alan was side by side with Mike, Ellen’s husband, hammering nails into planks of plywood to further buttress the closed-off entranceway to their
building. Over the clatter of their work Mike shouted, “This doesn’t bode well!”

“What?” Alan stopped hammering, as did Mike.

“This. This doesn’t bode well. Us sealing ourselves in, FEMA barricading the only exit . . . this doesn’t look like it’s gonna be resolved anytime soon.”

“Soon?” Alan replied, taking a breath.

“Yeah, soon. I’ve got faith. This’ll blow over. Everything does. A monsoon hits, people die. Still, life goes on, normalcy resumes. Tsunamis. Collapsed levees. Earthquakes. This’ll blow over. New York’s a tough town.”

Alan nodded at Mike’s hopeful platitudes but wasn’t buying. And anyway, according to the news, New York wasn’t alone in this predicament. This was global.

“I tried to load up on reserves,” Mike continued, “but it was pretty picked over at D’ag’s and Food Emporium. I don’t get why Food City closed up so soon. What’s that all about?”

“Maybe ’cause it’s not a chain,” Alan posited. “The owners probably just took what they needed and booked.”

“Maybe,” Mike allowed. “Still, I think we’re pretty well stocked. I think if we pushed it we could go a month, but
that’s
not gonna happen.” Mike smiled without conviction and looked to Alan for reassurance. “We’ll be fine. London during the Blitz and so on. We’ll be okay,” Mike nattered.

Alan closed his eyes and drifted inward, Tammy’s face imprinted in the darkness behind his eyelids. Phone service had been spotty at best and it wounded him that she and he had parted badly. Right after the Costco trip they’d had a nasty public fight and after he’d finished hiking his half of the supplies up to his apartment she’d screeched, “Don’t thank me all at once you fuckin’ prick!
Aw
, your arms hurt, your poor, delicate, artist’s arms!
Aw,
you got a fuckin’ callous on your precious digits?! You’ll be fuckin’ glad I’m ‘an
alarmist,’ you asshole! Mark my fuckin’ words!” She’d slammed into her Honda CR-V and sped off, and though they’d since made up via Instant Messenger, that was the last he’d heard from her. Land lines were tied up or nonoperational. Cell service? History. And now the Internet was iffy, too.

Even though Tammy had stocked up equally, Alan wished she’d stayed, not because of that but because she was on the ground floor of a private house in Bay Ridge. He thought of the Three Little Pigs, he residing in the brick house, she in the wood. At least it wasn’t straw. He suspected he’d never hear her voice again.

Tammy’s face rippled away, replaced by Ellen’s. Alan wasn’t sure why but he always went for tart women (as opposed to women who were tarts). Ellen, whose serial hallway flirtatiousness—especially since she’d had the baby—always seemed seasoned with a smidgen of sarcasm, was close to Alan’s ideal, at least physically. At the moment, convinced he’d never know the touch of a woman again, Alan resented Mike. He resumed hammering, then stopped, sighed, and gave Mike’s arm a gentle squeeze.