Pariah (8 page)

“And that’s a good thing?”

“Just go away, Ruth. Let me enjoy this. Forget I said anything. Please.”

Abe poked his head back out the window.

Things were back to normal. No pushing. No shoving. No turbulence. Just the usual vegetable parade. He mashed his head into the upholstery and, eyes shut, pondered the quiet. Once upon a time he’d have cherished such silence but not now. He missed the sound of traffic. The buses that used to run along York, even their whining hydraulics.

Sitting there, eyes closed, a faint sound wafting past the discolored chintz oozed into Abe’s ears; one in addition to the brainless lowing of the shamblers. One that he couldn’t place, dull and echoey. With effort Abe disengaged from the chair and craned his head out, looking north—
nada
—then south—
bingo
! Something was plowing uptown through the crowd, weaving past abandoned vehicles left at
jagged angles. As it approached the sound amplified. Thumping. “The hell?” Abe said to himself. It was moving at a decent clip. A car. No,
taller
. One of those mini-SUVs, only he couldn’t hear the roar of an engine over the wet thud of rickety bodies jouncing off its hard surfaces. Maybe a hybrid; they ran silent.

Abe wanted to shout to its pilot but there was no point; that machine wasn’t stopping for anything. But unless those things had learned how to drive, at least there was evidence of life beyond this sapped bunch. As it neared the building Abe got a good, albeit fleeting, look at the vehicle. The front end was a dark mass of blood-drenched concavities. Though he was pretty certain those things didn’t feel panic, it was clear they weren’t thrilled with becoming temporary hood ornaments as they were bounced up off the pavement, or ground up below.

As the small sport ute plowed northwards it hit the shell of a dead car masked by the crowd. The savage impact echoed through the canyon of buildings and again Abe witnessed a driver explode through his windshield. “Poor bastard,” Abe sighed, anticipating the crowd swarming on the mangled driver, ripping him to shreds as the entrée du jour. But they didn’t. An aperture opened in the crowd before the now-smoking wreck of his ride.

“What the hell?” Abe said, confounded.

The zombies were spreading out, away from the area where the driver’s body lay. Abe couldn’t see him, he was out of range and masked by the multitude, but there was no doubt they weren’t all swarming him. A bestial moaning came from that direction, making the hairs on Abe’s neck rise. “That’s new,” he gasped.

With reluctance, he tore himself away from the window as Ruth entered the room.

“What was that?” she cried.

“A crash,” he said. “A car. It crashed. I gotta see if anyone else is seeing this.”

As he left the apartment Ruth shuffled over to where he’d been for her own look. In the hall there was a commotion of voices. Abe heard Karl shout something about the roof and in spite of his protesting legs, he hied upstairs. As he neared the top few steps an explosion rocked the building and he gripped the handrail to avoid tumbling back down.

“My heart,” he sputtered.

When he stepped onto the tar paper he saw black smoke churning up from below. Energy spent, he shuffle-jogged the rest of the way, joining some of the other men at the edge of the roof.

“I didn’t think hybrids blew like that,” he panted.

“The car he hit did,” Karl clarified. “Anyway, why do you think it was a hybrid?”

“I didn’t hear the engine.”

“Engine was makin’ plenty of noise,” Dabney said. “You’re just a bit deaf, old-timer.”

Abe was about to protest, but Alan shouted, “Are you guys nuts? Who cares what kind of car that was? A person’s dead!”

“Yeah, and they weren’t eating him,” Karl added.

“Maybe,” Dabney said.

“I saw it, too,” Abe confirmed. “They were spreading out. It was weird.”

“Maybe they smelled some leaky gasoline,” Dabney countered. “Backed off ’cause they knew it was gonna blow.”

“That’s giving them an awful lot of credit,” Karl said.

“Animals know when trouble’s afoot,” Dabney said. “Thunderstorms and earthquakes. We don’t know dick about those things except they like eating us. They could have all kinds of animal cunning. Some heightened senses. They can smell blood.”

Hearing that, Alan thought about Mike and turned to go downstairs to check on Ellen, who’d popped an Ambien or two earlier and was out like a light. Just as well. Two fresh kills in rapid
succession would be too much. As he passed back into the building the others continued to debate what they’d just witnessed.

“Too much excitement for one day,” he said to himself.

As he let himself back into Ellen’s apartment, Eddie and Dave tore out of theirs and Alan was grateful, at least, to have avoided them.

Alan stared across the queen-size mattress at Ellen, who slept peacefully. He didn’t know how to feel. When he’d come back in, through her Ambien-induced haze she’d burbled something dreamily at him, and before he knew it they’d been a tangle of naked limbs. Mike had died a scant few hours earlier. Died was the least of it. That made it seem peaceful—in their current predicament almost enviable. He’d been
devoured
, and here Alan lay, in Mike’s bed, perhaps even on Mike’s side—chances were that Ellen snoozed in her normal spot, so Alan was occupying a dead man’s very personal real estate. Talk about fate tossing him a live grenade.

Ellen’s body, even dissipated, still held attraction for Alan. Okay, it was a sort of hot emaciated-supermodel Buchenwald kind of sexiness, but she still had that certain indefinable something that put lead in Alan’s pencil. Thinking of pencils, Alan grabbed one and a scratch pad and began to sketch her.

Gone were the pleasing soft curves, but if he could get into an Egon Schiele state of mind he could do some good work. Some people found Schiele’s work erotic. Alan didn’t happen to be one
of them, but one must adapt to the here and now. Ellen’s areolas and nipples were dusky, almost burgundy, in sharp contrast to her pale skin. Her wasted breasts pooled on her chest, flattened empty sacs, yet he’d sucked on them like they dispensed the antidote. Unlike the others, Ellen steered clear of the roof and had gotten paler and paler in the weeks past. The triangular patch of black pubic hair stood out in sharp relief against her ashy skin, thick and matted with sweat and the commingled fluids of their lovemaking.

It didn’t feel like love. It had felt desperate, rapacious, panic stricken, violent. It had also been the first pleasurable expenditure of energy Alan could remember since everything turned rotten. Even with their bones grinding together it was the fulfillment of a bygone wet dream.
Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he ’live, or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread,
Alan remembered from childhood.
What the hell kind of fucked-up thing is that to teach a kid? Grind his
bones
to make my
bread? What kind of bread is that? And now the things out there wanted to do the same basic thing, only skip the carbs. We’ll just eat you alive, thanks all the same.

Alan’s drawing was not turning out the way he wanted. Ellen looked twisted and knotty, her contours convex where they oughtn’t be, concave likewise. Her tangle of brunette curls a greasy amorphous blob, obscuring her face save for one closed eyelid tinted dark as a shiner. She looked as if she’d been elongated on the rack like some accused heretic during the Inquisition. His pencil said Ticonderoga but it might as well have read Torquemada by the way it rendered Alan’s fluky new girlfriend. The First Grand Inquisitor of Spain would have been proud to reduce a human being to Ellen’s pitiful status—all in a day’s work in the name of the Lord. The problem with the drawing was that it was perfect. It looked just like her.

Ellen didn’t need to see this. Alan crumpled the drawing and
tossed it out the window, where it landed right on the blood-smeared spot on which Mike had met his fate.
What would Goya do?
Alan wondered. The phrase reminded Alan of those WWJD bumper stickers and T-shirts and friendship bracelets and whatever else they emblazoned that catchphrase on.
What Would Jesus Do?
Well, from the looks of things, he’d abandon his precious flock and let them rot. Good thing Alan didn’t believe in that nonsense or he’d be pretty disenchanted with the Almighty.

Back to Goya and an artist’s duty. Though he did plenty of pretty canvases, ol’ Francisco didn’t shy away from capturing ugliness. Alan thought of Goya’s painting,
Saturn Devouring One of his Sons.
In it, the mythological giant grips the partially dismembered naked body of one of his sons, the giant’s eyes insane with paranoia and perhaps a tinge of grief as he gnaws off his progeny’s head. Alan had plenty of firsthand experience seeing bodies being dismembered—and documenting them. In his apartment he had several walls covered top to bottom with drawings and paintings he’d done of the mob outside, both individual and group studies. He was the Audubon of the undead—keeper of the visual record of humanity’s demise.

But for whom?

Who would look at these renderings? The likelihood of future generations was pretty much nil. Time travelers? Space aliens? No, this was art for art’s sake. Like the need to breathe and eat, Alan had discovered he was predisposed to do art. He’d always wondered how pure his drive was. Did he merely create in order to impress others? He’d mostly done work for print. Now there was no audience. For a while he thought he’d only do art if there were remuneration upon completion. What a price to pay to confirm one’s dedication. His apartment was a gallery devoted to but a single theme:
T
HE
E
ND
. Pencil drawings, pastels, pen and ink, a few water-colors, which strictly speaking weren’t done with water. Not with
their water shortage. He used urine, which worked out fine. The yellow pigment added authenticity to the subject matter. At least he could work in oils. Plus, the thinner got him a bit high.

So art still had its little dividends.

And he’d bagged the model of his dreams.

Who now stirred.

“
Mmmmm
,” she purred. “Hello.”

Speaking of high, Ellen looked a trifle baked. He wondered how many Ambiens had she’d taken, then choked back the notion that she’d maybe tried to join Mike. Her eyes swam in their hollows, unfocused. As she blinked herself back to cognizance she looked confused, rabbity.

“You’re not Mike. What are
you
doing here?” Her query was accusatory. She shook her head, attempting to reengage her brain. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Mike’s dead. Mike’s dead now. Alan. I’m sorry.” She attempted a smile, but her mouth made the wrong shape. “What a day, huh?” A failed attempt at mirth employing the frowsy cadence of a secretary at the water cooler.

“Yeah,” Alan mumbled.

“What’s that smell?” she said, wrinkling her nose.

“Uh, a fire outside. I’ll tell you about it later.”

“A fire?” she repeated, eyes still glassy.

“Yeah. It’ll keep.”

Ellen eased closer to Alan on the rumpled bedclothes and pressed her head against his bare chest. She draped her arms around him. He yearned for his monastic apartment.

“So,” she whispered, “are you moving in or not?”

An entreaty.

An invitation.

A trap.

______

With the pretext of needing some things from his pad, Alan disengaged from Ellen and fled her constricting lair. With nimble assurances he edged out into the common hall and left her standing in her kitchen. At the cessation of the multiple clicks of her dead bolts engaging, the door across the hall swung open and there stood Eddie, looking wry and malevolent with a fishing rod in his hand.

“You don’t waste any time, do you?” he leered. “Y’know, I always figured you for queer, but I doff my lid to you, Zotz. You got right in there like a champ and got the booty. Hats off, bud.”

“What are you . . . ?”

“Don’t play dumb, champ.” Waggling the fishing rod to make his point, Eddie held up Alan’s smoothed-out crumpled drawing of Ellen. “I did a little fishing in Lake Swenson.” He turned the drawing over, its back flecked with bloodstains.

Alan stared at his handiwork in disbelief. “With everything going on outside you rescued that drawing from the alley? Are you fucking insane?”

“Car crashes are a dime a dozen,” Eddie said, grinning, “but art is forever.”

“
Car crashes are a dime a
—” Alan shook his head like a wet dog trying to make sense of that statement. “What? Name the last time you saw a car driving by.”

“Been ages. But it didn’t do us any good, did it? Anyway, other sounds were of more interest. Ellen never moaned like that with Mikey boy, I can tell you. Even back in the day.”

Alan shoved Eddie into his apartment and closed the door behind them.

“Jesus Christ, Eddie. She might hear you,” Alan said, jabbing his finger into Eddie’s ditchlike sternum.

“Everyone hears everyone, Casanova. Sound travels. Especially when you’re bangin’ a screamer. She was making so much noise
I thought she was gettin’ eaten alive. I guess maybe she was, actually.” Eddie smirked. With a plastic magnetic banana he affixed the drawing to his refrigerator door, admiring it. “Not like the old days, though, huh? Back in the day Ellen had some boasty titties. Well, you make do with what you’ve got, right? Don’t let the perfect get in the way of the good enough.”