Pariah (7 page)

“I’m serious.” He turned to face the others at the bar. “Anyone else wanna leave, now’s the time. After these two, you stay until they says otherwise an’ that’s it. Lockdown time at Casey’s.”

A couple of other patrons polished off their drinks and plodded over to the door, reluctant to put the barkeep’s edict to the test. The rest stayed put, watching the televisions, gorging on chicken wings. Eddie and Dave locked eyes and like they’d done before matches, punched each other on the shoulders.

“You ready for this shit?” Eddie said, uncertainty tingeing his voice.

“No,” Dave said, opting for honesty.

“You’ll be all right.” Eddie smiled. “You’re with me.”

“Awright,” the bartender said. He undid the lock and pushed open the door a hair. “Get out, quick.” As an afterthought he added, “An’ good luck.” Then he pulled the door shut and locked it behind them. Eddie and Dave lived across the avenue and halfway up the block, but that short distance looked like an uphill battle, even though it was downhill. Dave looked south and saw black
smoke rising from various unseen fires. The body that had hit the window lay dead a few feet away, its head collapsed from the double impact. A military troop transport rumbled up York Avenue with little regard for the foot traffic that surged around it in blind panic.

“See?” Eddie beamed, “Here comes the fuckin’ cavalry!”

The vehicle roared by and Dave and Eddie saw bloodied bodies affixed to the sides, scratching at the armored plating. The bodies looked broken but agitated. A man clung to the side, his head facing away from the truck, twisted one hundred and eighty degrees the wrong way. Drool and blood hung in long swaying loops from his shattered jaw. As the truck passed, Dave and Eddie gaped as they saw the troops inside being attacked and consumed by similar assailants. With another, “Fuck this shit,” Eddie took off in the wake of the truck, which momentarily cleared a path. Dave followed, slipping once or twice on fresh blood that leaked from the vehicle. They were more like Custer’s cavalry, with York Avenue as Little Bighorn and the infected as the Sioux and Cheyenne.

As Eddie fished for his keys at the front door to their building a freshly reanimated little girl, no more than five or six, sprang up and attempted to bite his forearm through his thick leather coat. Eddie knew this kid. Not by name, but he’d seen her and her mom in Carl Schurz Park. Her mom was a bona fide MILF and he’d always slowed his jog to get an eyeful of her cleavage. The kid had been cute, too, though more than once he’d seen her pitching a fit for ice cream or cookies. Now the kid’s blood-streaked face was contorted into a parody of childish greed, and human meat was all she craved. One eye bulged from its socket, the white showing all the way around the iris.

Without a moment’s hesitation Eddie punched her square in the face, shattering the small skull within. She dropped to the pavement, disoriented but not motionless. Twitching, she rocked herself side to side, like an upside-down turtle.

“Fuckin’ cuntlet!” Eddie bellowed, examining the bite marks. Assured he was uninjured, he raised his foot and stomped on her head, splattering bone and brain onto the sidewalk. Dave froze a few feet shy of the episode, raising his hands to his mouth. Eddie unlocked the vestibule door and with great impatience shouted, “You in or out, Dave?”

Dave sidestepped the stain that used to be a little girl and, once safely inside the entrance hall, puked. He then looked helplessly at Eddie, who was examining his bare forearm. A little discoloration from the bite was evident, but that was all.

“If that little cunt didn’t still have her milk teeth I might be in trouble,” Eddie said, brow creased as he mulled this over. “Seriously. That was close.”

“Yeah,” Dave said, wiping his mouth.

Their neighbor, Gerri, stood at the top of the steps, looking bedazzled. As they stepped past her onto the second floor landing she pointed at the vomit.

“You can’t leave that there. It’s unsanitary.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Eddie grumbled.

Gerri’s Yorkie, Cuppy, skittered down the stairs and began lapping up Dave’s sick.

“Sorry,” Dave murmured. “I’ll get it later.”

“Do something, you piles of pus.”

Even before things got as bad as they’d gotten, Abe Fogelhut knew the drill. He was eighty-three years old, the TV and radio were shot, he’d never been much of a reader—except for the occasional paper, and even there it was strictly the
Post
or the
News
, never the hoity-toity bleeding-heart
Times
—so he did what old people do: he sat by the window and watched the world putrefy, counting off the minutes until the final letdown. If he had any balls he’d have hurried the process up. Why forestall the inevitable?

Because as lousy as this life was, this was all you got.

The final reward was finality, period. Except these days it wasn’t, so death had lost some of its appeal.

So Abe did what he did. Today, much like the day before, and the day before, and the day before that. He’d arranged his frail, emaciated body into a semblance of comfort in the threadbare upholstered chair, parted the dingy chintz curtains, opened the dusty venetian blinds and took his position as eyewitness to nothing. The throng milled about—same old, same old. Nothing ever changed.
Even the ache in Abe’s empty belly had quieted to a dull numbness. He’d actually welcome the sharpness of the hunger pangs, but you can get used to anything. And that was the problem. He was used to the way things were.

With some effort, Abe opened the window, leaned his head out a little, worked up some glutinous saliva and spat into the mindless crowd directly beneath his fifth-floor dwelling. The thick, pasty blob plopped onto one thing’s noggin and the schmuck didn’t even have the decency to notice, to become outraged or even annoyed. They never reacted. Abe sighed with resignation and eased back from the window, repositioning himself in his seat. “This is what it comes down to,” he muttered. “This is what passes for entertainment in this hollow semblance of a world.
Feh.
” He mashed his head back into the cushion and clamped his eyes shut, grinding his already nubbin teeth, taking shallow breaths. “What’s the point?” he moaned. “What’s the goddamn point?”

“What’s the point of what?”

“Exactly.”

Ruth shuffled into the room, her slippers shushing against the worn carpeting. He kept his eyes shut. She was unbearable to look at. The skin under her sharp jaw was a loose curtain, whatever nasty business lurked beneath barely hidden by her translucent epidermis. Abe could avoid looking at himself. He didn’t bother with mirrors any more, not since he stopped shaving. His whiskers had itched at first, but they concealed the sins of his lank flesh so they earned their keep. Plus, why waste water these days? For the sake of vanity? Vanity was outmoded folly, even in light of the facial hair. Abe smelled like the old parchment he resembled, his skin felt like membranous cheap leather. He’d stopped changing clothes on a daily basis weeks ago. Why bother? He’d stopped bathing before that, except to wipe a damp sponge in a desultory manner under his pits and over his balls and ass.

But to see Ruth in the same situation was intolerable. She’d always taken such pride in her appearance. She had been vain, back when vanity wasn’t such a futile pursuit. Now she looked like a wizened mummy sheathed loosely in drab Kmart dressing. If Abe had anything in his belly to vomit up upon seeing her, he would, as a eulogy to her former beauty.

“What’s the point of what?”
Ruth repeated.

“Of anything. Of everything. Of answering that question.”

“Then what’s the point of asking it every day?”

“Exactly. Exactly so.”

“I hate talking to you when your eyes are closed,” Ruth complained.

“I hate talking to you when my eyes are open.”

Weeks ago that rejoinder might have brought tears to Ruth’s eyes, but she knew what Abe meant, and if she had any more tears to cry she still might shed a few, but she was dry as the Sahara. Abe listened to Ruth hobble back out of the living room and gradually opened his eyes again to stare out the window. Though Jewish in name, he’d always been an atheist, and nothing he’d ever seen or experienced dissuaded him from that. This was it. This was all you got. So, he’d live as long as possible, and when the time came that he keeled over in his chair from starvation and dehydration, at least he’d be able to say to himself that he’d ridden it out.

Whatever that’s worth.

It wasn’t like he didn’t envy the dumb bastards who had faith. They were the lucky ones. They just assumed, even in light of the nonstop reality show outside, that when you died your soul departed for a better place. Those ambling piles of rot out there were just empty husks.

In the kitchen, Ruth foraged in the cupboard. They still had a few tiny provisions, most provided by the generosity of their
neighbors, but those would soon be depleted. There was a box of melba toast, some peanut butter, a can of lima beans, a can of SpaghettiOs and an individual stick of Slim Jim beef whatever-it-is. There were also three plastic gallon jugs of water. The pipes were as arid as she was, so they no longer bothered to test the faucet. All it did was groan, and if she wanted to hear that noise she’d stay in the living room and listen to Abe.

Unlike her husband, Ruth’s faith had come back to her, and that was before things had turned to shit. Around the time of her mother’s death, Ruth had renewed her bond to Judaism, which had caused much consternation in her husband, who thought she was cured of that foolishness.

When Ruth turned sixty-six, her mother, Ida, ninety-two and more vegetable than animal, finally gave up the ghost. At the time of her death, Ida’s age and weight were the same; she was bedridden, had virtually no brain function and, if this was possible, looked worse than Ruth looked currently. Prior to her actual demise, bits of Ida had predeceased her in the form of amputated limbs gone sour from gangrene due to poor circulation.

At the time it had put Abe in the mind of an old World War II joke about a captive American in a German POW camp who is on work duty fixing the roof in the rain. He slips while mending a hole and catches his leg on a rusty nail. He ends up losing the leg and requests that the guard send it back to the States to be buried. The guard is sympathetic and honors the request. The same POW is back on work detail and fixing another roof hole when the same thing happens. He loses the other leg and makes the same request, which is also honored. The POW, now legless, is on work detail in the lumber mill. He is feeding planks through a table saw and loses an arm. He makes the same request to have the limb sent back to the States for burial. This time the guard denies the appeal. “But why?”
the POW asks. “Because,” the guard says, “the commandant thinks you are attempting to escape, piece by piece.”

That joke lost its appeal as old lady Ida escaped piece by piece from the Golden Acres Assisted Living Facility of Maspeth four times—plus she’d gone blind from diabetes, was incontinent, lost the power of speech, didn’t know who the hell she was, where she was, if she was. And as one terrible thing after another befell Ida, Ruth began going to the local temple to make her peace with God. By the time Ida mercifully kicked the bucket—no mean feat considering she
had
no feet—Ruth was very active in the temple and Abe was very alienated from his wife. They lived together, but apart. It would have bothered him more if he was still sexually attracted to her, but that part of their relationship had “escaped” long ago. He’d watched Ida’s nightmarish living putrefaction and thought to himself many times,
There is no God
. Ida had never been his favorite person, but no one should have to go through what she did before snuffing it. He wouldn’t wish that on Hitler.

Well, maybe Hitler.

And Stalin.

But that’s about it.

From outside, a guttural yawp burst the bubble of silence and Abe heaved himself to the window in time to watch the spectacle blossom below. This was new: one of the pus bags had sunk his teeth into another, much to his victim’s consternation. As the aggressor tore out a chunk of the other’s rotting flesh, both uttered unutterably foul noises, setting off a wave of restlessness through the normally torpid crowd. The antagonist choked down the chunk of fetid flesh, quaked a little, then vomited it back up. A spastic skirmish ensued.

“You gotta see this!” Abe shouted. “Hey, honey . . . ,”
old habits
die hard
, “. . . these sons of bitches have finally started in on each other!” Abe clapped his hands in delight. “They’re evolving! Soon the miserable bastards will be at each other’s throats, just like regular people!” Abe began laughing and coughing simultaneously.

“What’s so great about that?” Ruth said.

Abe caught his breath, sighed, and squinted at Ruth. “You really know how to suck the joy out of the moment.”

“How is that joyful? What is joyful about those things attacking each other? It’s horrible. They’re horrible.”

“Irony is lost on you, Ruth. You never could handle it. It’s funny to me, see, because in spite of all the terrible things you could say about those sacks of waste out there, they always seem to get along, even if it’s completely mindless. But now they’re pushing and shoving. Even dead and reanimated we’re hardwired for odium. Even those brain-dead heaps of flesh eventually manifest hostility toward each other. It’s the human way to be inhuman.”