Fiend (6 page)

And then it’s nothing but the drumming of shotgun shells and I’m Rambo—fire, pump, fire, pump—I’m shooting more by feel than sight, more by instinct than logic. I can hear Travis and Type doing the same and I might be screaming or maybe that’s one of them but we just keep shooting and they keep coming, their laughs taunting us like our efforts are futile
and we’ll never live to see the sun and they will prevail because they don’t give a fuck if they live or die.

My shotgun runs out of ammo. I panic for a second, then remember the pistol tucked in my waistband. I pull it out and fire. I don’t come close to hitting anything. These motherfuckers are less than ten feet away and I glance at Travis, who swings the butt of his shotgun like a baseball bat. I steady my aim on a woman of about thirty, completely naked, pale like moonlit lakes. She’s a few feet away and I tell her I’m sorry. She swipes at me. I pull the trigger. The edge of her forehead explodes. She drops.

I do this again.

And again.

I hear a different kind of scream and turn around. One of these things is locked up with Travis and he’s writhing and crying for help and I take two steps over and know my shot could easily miss the Chuck and kill Travis but he can’t stop yelling and I figure he’ll be dead either way. I fire and the reanimate stumbles for a second. I fire again and it drops to the ground.

Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, Typewriter yells.

I spin around and can’t see anything but I still hear the laughs. All the noise must have attracted more and I picture them coming, throngs of the motherfuckers. All around us are the bodies we shot, some twitching, some crawling, and blood, thick, so fucking thick.

Typewriter grabs me and shoves me toward the car. I climb in and Type slides in the driver’s side. Just outside my window, I see Travis sitting on his ass, knees up, his head
between them. Then he glances up. Blood runs down his face. It’s beautiful in a way, the bite of flesh missing above his eye like an Amazonian waterfall.

We need to get—

Fuck him, Typewriter says.

He turns the ignition. The piece of shit Civic sputters, doesn’t catch.

Travis seems to understand he’s being left. He reaches out. He mouths something. The engine turns again and I look ahead and see more coming, a steady stream of people who went to bed one night, probably annoyed at the thought of getting up and having to go to work or feed the kids or deal with a complaining wife, only to never wake up again, at least not as a human. Typewriter bashes the steering wheel. I hear something bump the side of the car. Travis has one bloodied hand pressed against the back window. He’s yelling for help. His eyes are so fucking sunken. More sputtering from the engine. I’m thinking I should unlock the door and get Travis in here. But could he already be one of them from that bite? How do I know if a bite really changes somebody? I see more of them coming now, close enough to be fully lit. I reach for the door handle to get out and grab Travis. But then I notice that the gash above his eye isn’t bleeding anymore. It’s already coagulated, crusty and purple. He’s yelling, Help, open, but now I know he’s going to turn, that his wound is not normal and whatever the fuck has caused this is already changing him into one of them.

The engine finally catches.

Type guns it. We hit a hillbilly Chuck and then he’s nothing
but two bumps under our tires. In the side mirror, I watch Travis try to stand. He’s circled. He’s dead. And at that moment, I understand that certain people are meant to make it, others aren’t. I’m not sure why. But I’ve spent my entire adult life walking that thin line between suicide and preservation, everything I do is to get more dope, to keep going, to survive. I’ve done bad things in my life, things I’m not proud of and things that won’t let me sleep sober. I remember the first time I saw somebody overdose, Frank, my best friend I’d gotten sober with, my roommate at the halfway house. We’d gone out together, relapsed, and we sat in a restroom at Starbucks and I smoked my speed and he shot his heroin. I knew he was going to die, the way his body went both rigid and limp. I stared at his freckles, ones that made him seem years younger than he was. I knew that in order to survive, to keep my habit, I had to leave him, pretend I was never there. I did. I left him propped up on the toilet, the sleeve of his puffy down coat still rolled up.

I do what I need to, just so I can get up and do it again.

Typewriter tells me to make a wish. His voice startles me, our drive nothing but silence after the gas station.

Huh?

He points to the clock. He says, All the same digits.

How can he be making idle talk after what just happened? Make a wish, he says again. I look out of the car and it’s so dark and I think about a TV show I saw about what will happen to our world after man dies. How the shrines we’ve built to money and security and happiness and love will be reduced to rubble in the blink of a geological eye. I know I’m
at the precipice of the most important moment of mankind’s history—fuck the invention of the wheel, the happy accident of penicillin, the fungus over Hiroshima, the Internet—because what’s happening right now, it’s biblical in scope, the end of fucking days.

I glance at Typewriter. His lips are moving but I can’t hear him. Maybe he’s making a wish, or praying, same thing really. That the Albino is still alive? That this is all a dream? He mouths the words with a sincerity I haven’t seen in him before. And then I think of him as John, not Typewriter, a person, a son, and that’s probably it, he’s focused on his mother, because that was his moment, her passing, the moment he can’t recover from, the moment that puts his lips to glass stem.

Pretty soon 1:11 is going to become 1:12 and it feels important that I make a wish because I’m pretty much out of other options. What comes to mind is KK—her being alive, holed up in a fortress, with enough food to last years and books to pass the days.

The first time I ever saw her was in the psych ward in the Somali neighborhood of the South Minneapolis ghetto. I wound up in the ward because I’d dropped out of college to smoke scante and finally my parents came to the apartment they paid for after I’d quit answering their calls. They knocked and knocked while I sat in my room with all the shades drawn, trying not to breathe. They called the cops, who didn’t think an arrest was in order, just a nice trip to the nuthouse. So there I sat in my scrubs and socks with little treads. I doodled during arts and crafts. That’s when KK walked in. Just a wisp of a girl, nothing but sharp angles and
a big nose and chopped blond hair, her arms pulled in tight across what little chest she had.

I’m not sure if I believe in love at first sight or any of that shit. But I know that sitting there in a room with half-retarded motherfuckers drooling from their lithium and trazodone, whatever I felt, it was close. Like I had this need to hold her, protect her bones from her parents or drugs or whatever wouldn’t let her sleep at night, and I wanted her to think I was funny and sexy and smart and beautiful, just fucking beautiful. Sitting there while the tech introduced us to her, I wanted to be better than I was, not just to fuck this girl, but to be better for her. Guess that’s a good enough definition of love.

Her waving really did me in. She kind of brought up her right hand all timid like. Her fingers didn’t even move. She looked around the room and then brought her face back down, her bangs shielding her from our predatory stares. But she still looked at me—two dots of topaz, not precious, but semiprecious.

That night, I started doing pushups. I quit masturbating to visions of the sluts from my recent past. I wanted to be better and I would be for her.

We hit it off, at least as well as any two people connecting in the psych ward can. We laughed sometimes. We rolled our eyes at stupid people. She told me she loved shooting speed and I felt like a fucking loser because I just smoked mine.

Then one day, toward the end of my stay, we stood at the garbage can scraping off our untouched beef Stroganoff, and she told me to meet her in the janitor’s closet in ten minutes.

I walked down the hall, excited because things were going
to work out. I thought about rhyme and reason and about the universe putting me in the position to get to her, KK, my savior, the girl made of birdlike bones with swathes of gauze along her wrists.

I knocked.

She opened the door and there she was among the trash bags and wet mops and bottles of industrial cleaning supplies. She smiled a genuine smile, little kid and bashful. It was hard to do sober, bridge the gap between indecision and decision, but she met me halfway, our lips touching.

I made love until she told me to fuck her.

Afterward, she sat between my legs, her head resting on my raised knee. I was thinking about us working out in the long run. She could go into treatment and we could be sober and together. I was also thinking about my sperm finding a suitable home in her tiny tubes and about the different guys she’d fucked and I told myself to stop, that every dick she’d sucked was only to get her to me.

I buried my face in her hair. It was grapefruit and sleep. My hand was around her arm and she moved it to her wrist. I felt the thick gauze. I wanted to protest, to tell her this made me feel weird inside. She wrapped her fingers around my index finger. My face was buried in her hair and I was huffing her, greedily wanting to remember this moment, and she guided my finger under her gauze bandage. It was the strangest feeling, how tender and moist her fresh wound still was, how much it was raised above the rest of her forearm, and I thought about telling her no, that I could get it dirty, infect it. Then she moaned a little, maybe a gasp, and the warmth and
intimacy of touching her most vulnerable moment are what books are written about.

I didn’t mean to tell her I loved her.

My finger was still touching her gash when she said, I love you too.

So with the digital clock still reading 1:11, I wish for KK to be safe. But that’s not all. I wish for her to be thinking of me, praying that
I
am safe, needing me, wanting me. I wish that KK and I can live the rest of our lives together, whatever that might mean, just together, to feel the tickle of her nose against my neck.

We park at the end of the dirt drive. I rush out to open up the gate. There’s nothing but pine trees. I sprint back to the car and we drive into the Albino’s compound. The little log cabin is pitch black inside. This doesn’t necessarily mean anything. The Albino is a sort of minimalist, no phone, a woodstove, that kind of thing. But still, I’m not trying to fight his reanimated corpse.

Just hope he cooked a big ol’ batch, Typewriter says.

For real, I say.

Neither of us cares if he’s dead or alive, just that our ounce is there, shrink-wrapped like a package of ground beef.

We get out of the car and I already have my shotgun pumped and I hear Typewriter’s and it’s weird because it all feels so natural, the cocking of guns, the killing of shit that
shouldn’t exist. We’re at the front door of his little shack, and I call out that it’s Chase and Typewriter.

The house stays dark.

I know there’s no way to get through the door—reinforced steel, double base rods (also steel)—and after we call out a few more times we say fuck it and head toward the prefab Lowe’s shack farther down the trail.

I see the faintest light coming from the baseboard of the shack, and I ask Typewriter if he thinks the Albino’s in there cooking.

Who the fuck he cooking for?

Himself?

Typewriter shrugs and puts his gun to his shoulder. We’re outside of the gray shed and there definitely is a band of light at the base of the door. Typewriter looks over. I nod. I knock.

It creaks open a few inches. This isn’t normal because the Albino is nothing but paranoia, both because he traffics in life sentences and he shoots shit on a four-hour rotation, and I squeeze the gun, using the barrel to open the door.

I’m about to step inside when a blast of noise fills my ears. I drop to the ground, crawling on my stomach to the side of the shed. Another blast and I realize it’s a gun and I’m screaming that it’s me, Chase, Albino, it’s Chase here. This is met by another shot.

I’m covered in sweat, or maybe that’s piss, and I don’t know if I should run into the woods or fire back or just keep calling out my name. I go with shouting. I say, It’s me, Albino, Chase from the Twin Cities. You know us. We’re cool.

Then I think that maybe it’s not the Albino in there.
Maybe he’s dead, and this is some tweaked motherfucker who had the same thought as us. Maybe it’s somebody who just stumbled across the shack and a gun. Maybe it’s one of
them
, maybe they know how to use weapons.

Type’s to my right and he’s on his stomach too. The light from the shed lets me see his back. I notice the scratches from Svetlana. They look healed, just like the gouge on that trucker’s face.

I don’t know any Chase, the Albino’s voice calls out.

Typewriter smirks at me.

I roll my eyes. I tell him it’s Crooked Cock—the name he’s dubbed me so he doesn’t have to know my real name.

Crooked Cock, that really you?

Yeah, and Typewriter.

You one of them?

No, man, we’re all good.

Bullshit.

You hear any giggling? I say.

Here to steal my shit? Figured I’d be dead?

Just had to get out of the cities.

Figured the Albino be a walking dead piece of shit, huh? Cuz I already lookin’ like one of them. That it?

Nowhere else to go, Typewriter says.

Figured the Albino was ready for this end-of-days shit, huh?

Maybe, I say.

I hear his laugh, followed by his cough, both unmistakable, both somehow reminding me of cement mixers.

Fucking Albino livin’ alone in the woods,
he’ll
know what to do, he says from inside.

Can we come in? I ask.

Fuck no, he says.

His laugh, his cough.

Is that a yes? I say.