the mortis (9 page)

Park goes behind the bar counter and looks around.  Shattered pint glasses and stoneware, empty bags made of a thin foil packaging.  Cardboard coasters soaked through.  Overturned chairs.  He picks up a few desiccated lemon rinds with the pulp gone and puts them in his mouth, chews them, and swallows. 

He levers all of the beer taps.  He opens the row of cabinet doors under the counter and tips back each aluminum cask with his hand, feeling for swash, and then he pinches the clear hose lines with his fingers.  He straightens.  He stretches out his arms and his back, his hamstrings. 

At his feet is a single dried corpse laid out on the waffled rubber floor matting, and he kneels down and pulls its leather belt out through the pant-loops until the strap is free.  Long and wide and dark brown with a heavy buckle, die-cast with a raised truck logo.  Park wraps the belt around his fist a couple of times and lets the buckle hang down on about a foot
’s worth of length. 

Behind the bar is a set of grey swinging doors that lead to a kitchen, and Park goes and stands next to them, looking through one of the circular windows.  He listens.  He looks through the window again.  There isn
’t enough light in the interior to make out any detail, but he doesn’t register movement, which is what matters.  He pushes through. 

He slips in and eas
es the door closed behind him, moves out of the path of the window light, and stands to one side of the entryway against a wall in the dark and waits there.  His eyes quickly adjust to the black.  The belt is wrapped tightly around his closed fist. 

In time he
’s able to make out shapes in the room—grey silhouettes of industrial-grade restaurant appliances.  The walk-in refrigerator unit.  The cast iron ring burners and a flattop grill platform set underneath an exhaust hood.  A row of banked ovens, all open.  The long countertops are littered with torn packaging from the stores of bulk dry goods ransacked shortly after the collapse.  He crouches down on the balls of his feet with his back on the wall, and the buckle on the end of the belt rasps the tile—he freezes, terrified that he just announced his arrival to the entire room.  After a time spent listening, hearing nothing, he carefully re-winds the strap so that some of the slack is taken in. 

Park walks the kitchen floor.  The aisles with their procession of segmented prep stations.  Nested stainless steel bowls, acrylic cutting boards.  A row of empty silver chafing dishes underneath a long fixture studded with heat lamps.  Scrap trays, a
ll empty.  No utensils at all—nothing made of metal that he could hold in his hand, bend inward on itself, and file into a keen edge against the concrete.

He passes next to an inset bay that holds a deep fryer system and he pauses to sieve through the remnants of the dark oil with his hand.  He dredges out some breaded debris, and he pulls the mask down around his throat.  He pushes everything into his mouth, licks his hand, and then repeats the
entire process. 

When the oil is gone, he moves to the flattop grill unit.  He looks down at the dark mantle of grease on the grill
’s backsplash—the blackened byproduct of heat and fat and flesh melding together—and starts to scratch at it.  His long, ragged nails raking through.  The crust starts to break apart after some effort, and then he stops and gathers the charred flakes into a pile and pushes them off the edge into his shaking hand.  He waits for a moment and then he eats from his palm slowly in the same way a drugged animal would.  When there’s nothing left on the backsplash, he stands and stares at the meat of his hand, losing track of time. 

Park keeps walking through the restaurant kitchen.  Touring the dark aisles, drifting past the remains of workstations still divided loosely by a series of lost functions.  Treading over broken fixtures and mountings and split PCB boards.  He pauses and turns over anything large enough to cover something useful.  He severs any fitted connection to see inside of both ends, he unlatches anything that appears secure, and he finds absolutely nothing for his trouble. 

He tries for a moment to think like someone who used to work in this place, a prep cook on the service line maybe.  He imagines himself standing in these factory aisles putting together plate after plate on one of those sweltering monsoon nights before everything on the islet went clean to hell.  The chatter of voices smoothed over with spiced ginger rum.  The strains of music.  He tries imagining where he might have hidden something of use, something he wasn’t supposed to have with him while on the floor, but nothing comes to mind.  After a while, he moves on.

Park walks the floor—foraging—finding not a damn thing, and after an hour he starts to feel lightheaded.  As he moves, he finds himself listing to one side.  Reeling.  Before long he
’s slumping heavily against anything solid to keep himself upright.  His body has gone feverish.  At first he holds out hope that the feeling will pass and he stops and waits, locked in his sunken posture, but it doesn’t pass. 

He ratchets down to his knees—he does it by his own will, before his weakness can force him down—and when that doesn
’t help he sits all the way back on the kitchen tile.  His spine is flat against the wall next to the entrance.  He closes his eyes for a moment, but then everything starts to pinwheel around and around in the dark, so he opens them.  He wipes his hand absentmindedly on his pant leg.

For a while he stays on the floor among the surroun
ding ruin—becoming part of it, his rightful place.  Joining in.  The grey dust layer around him.  Human hair and tissue and bone—once vibrant and fluid, porous—reduced to a blanket of fine, arid powder.  The stark, quiet presence of hundreds of desiccated insect husks with their dull, black eyes hollowed out. 

On the floor near him there is an emptied bag made of heavy paper, and according to the label, it once carried fifty pounds of raw, granulated white sugar, 100% Brazilian cane.  All of that precious sweetness is gone now.  Every last grain of it is long gone, and the truth is that most of it was probably taken by some combination of vermin, the inheritors of the good earth, whether insect or rodent, but Park allows himself to imagine that the remainder was gathered by some fortunate survivor.  Cupped in her withered palms and sifted into a container and swirled, dust and all, into any available liquid and swallowed down.  Almost unbearable, the taste of something so gentle, out here.  Maybe the last confection anyone will ever experience in this short life. 

Park is drifting off, head against the wall.  He coughs once, lightly.  He wipes his mouth and then he remembers the mask; he pulls it up over his face and smoothes it down, shaping it.  The fabric doesn’t help much with the air but it helps some.  He crosses his arms and realizes that he doesn’t have the belt wrapping his hand anymore, but he doesn’t look for it. 

Soon his mind drifts to the obligation, the commitment, and even though he doesn
’t want to think about it, about anything, he pictures the suite upstairs and the brown zippered pouch and the rows of medicine bottles, brownish-orange with child-resistant white caps.  So damn many of them.  He yawns and scratches his arm, then shifts his body so that he’s lying all the way flat on the floor.

He closes his eyes.  It
’s so quiet in this place.  After a short time he starts to understand that he may stay here, that he may not be getting up again. 

A sound from his left side wakes him and he opens his eyes.  He goes up onto one elbow and turns his head, listening hard, and soon the sound comes again.  The sound of struggle, of repeated failure—the most human of sounds.  He climbs to his feet.  He stands there, swaying, with his head cocked toward the source as he watches for movement.  Any notable difference.  Something he may have missed during the
first walkthrough. 

On the far wall there is a door, and it
’s been obstructed by a stainless steel prep station with a hardwood tabletop crisscrossed with deep scarring, the kind of surface used for breaking down meat.  The door is simple—painted the same color as the walls, an off-white color—easy to overlook.  On the other side of the door is probably an office for the manager or maybe a break room.  Extra storage for the things you can’t find any other place for.  Whatever is making the sounds is inside of that space.

Park goes to the prep station and puts a hand on each support to test the weight.  He pulls lightly on the structure
—there’s no movement, no give.  He kneels and examines the base, and as he touches the steel legs he sees that the caster wheels have been levered off.  All four of them.  The metal is riding directly on the tile.  He straightens, looks up at the ceiling and exhales, rubbing his head. 

He looks down.  This thing, this butchery table, was positioned here by someone.  The wheels were pried off and it was left in front of the door to keep something inside or to keep someone like him out, potentially both.  He needs to find out what
could possibly justify all that effort. 

He lays hi
s hands on the supports again, grips tightly and heaves backward, harder this time, and after a few moments the structure skids toward him by about five inches.  That’s plenty far enough.  He leans over the prep station and tries the doorknob but it doesn’t turn, and so he climbs onto the tabletop, stands up, and stomps on the knob with the heel of his shoe until it snaps free, splintering the wood composite.  The knob pings against the floor and rolls in a few listless circles before settling.  He kneels, puts two fingers in the jagged hole, and pulls the door open until the stile rests on the table’s edge.  It won’t move any further, and that’s exactly how he wants it.  He climbs down from the prep station and he waits.

Park expects that it will only take a few moments for a gaunt face to appear in front of him.  The face will be pressed tautly into the gap between the door and the jamb, and it will be ghoulish and wide-eyed, staring out, straining.  He expects to see the face,
at least one, but it doesn’t come.  Nothing does.  There is no pale arm reaching out from the dark.  No sounds from inside.  There’s not a single sign of life.

Minutes pass and Park stands and waits, watching closely, and
when he feels ready he climbs quietly onto the tabletop, squats low, and puts his face closer to the gap.  He stares into the dark, trying to make out the details of the room, but it’s like staring at the fabric of a black curtain; before long, he gives up and climbs back down.  He bends at the knees, puts both hands on the steel legs of the prep station, and hauls the table a few feet away from the wall.  The sound echoes and then the doorway is free.

Park enters the room.  The thin light spilling in from the open door behind him isn
’t enough—he steps in blindly.  Right away, he moves to one side out of the entryway, crouching low, and he keeps still.  He listens like he’s still new to the wild, like he still believes that the results he gathers can somehow be used to his benefit. 

Soon he can make out the bleary cast of a metal file cabinet and an L-shaped desk and a swivel chair.  Framed artwork on the wall, just a row of solid black rectangles without any visible detail, like voided windows.  The dark carpeting underneath him. 
As far as he can see, there’s no one else here.

When he feels ready to move, he walks carefully, arms extended, to the file cabinet and rattles the metal drawers, five of them, but they don
’t open.  He runs his palm along the top of the cabinet through the thick cake of dust and bits of drywall, but nothing is there.  He wipes his hand on his pant leg. 

He turns to the desk unit, and when he does, he sees
a number of taut cords strung across the work surface.  It’s jarring, seeing them there.  Running corner to corner, lashing diagonally and laterally.  A thin class of rope—the kind that has a braided sheath spun over the thread core, like what a rock climber might use.  He kneels down and sees that the end of each cord is knotted around a desk leg. 

He needs to leave this place. 
He immediately turns toward the door and begins feeling his way toward the thin light coming in from the kitchen.  The sound of his hurried footfalls, his breathing.  He is nearing the entryway when he catches sight of something he missed on the way in—a recessed alcove with a handful of appliances and a three-cushion sofa.  On the sofa there is a prone figure, a pale woman, tied down with cord.

You should never
approach them, the helpless—not in the wild.  There are no helpless.  The term has no real significance. 

Out here, there are only the dead and the surviving, and some of those who have survived for this long will label themselves helpless so they can draw you in close, feigning injury the way animals do.  When you
’re close enough they’ll turn, and their strength will be startling to you—it will knock you back on your heels.  And for that reason you should always leave the so-called helpless be.  Allow them to stay consigned to whatever sorry situation they’ve gotten themselves into, real or simulated, accidental or inflicted.