Grants Pass (3 page)

I looked down at my shoes, the
leather now scratched. “Oh, this and that,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t
tell him. As I said, I wasn’t ashamed. “Nothing now.” As the words left my
lips, the ravens abruptly fell silent, turning as one to gaze at us.

“
Quoth the
raven, nevermore,” he said, lips curving into a half-smile again. “I’m Lucas.”

I noted the lack of a last name and
decided to follow suit. “Sarah.”

He held out his hand, and feeling
slightly ridiculous, I shook it. His fingers were cool and dry. “I have a place
that I’ve set up,” he said. “You want to come back there with me?”

I shrugged, my hand still in his.
“Why not? It’s not like I have anywhere else to go.” As we left the park, we
heard the ravens begin their mourning song again.

****

His place consisted of the lobby
of a tiny hotel, the neon sign gone to darkness. One of the glass entry doors
had been smashed; he put a piece of cardboard up in its place after we entered.
The lights in the dusty chandelier were glowing reluctantly, flickering as the
electricity waxed and waned.

I felt a surge of hope at the sight
of those lights. “The electricity is still on. That means that there must be
someone still alive.”

“
I think the
plants can keep running for a while unmanned,” Lucas said. “It’s been cutting
in and out for a while, and I guess it’ll go out for good soon. I have plenty
of candles and torches and stuff.”

In the dim light, I saw boxes and
plastic bags stacked up around the sides of the room. Lucas led me past them to
a small office at the back of the lobby. There were no lights on inside, and it
took me a moment to recognize the black chitinous items piled within. Guns. He
pulled the weapon from his trousers and added it to the pile before closing the
door firmly again, locking it with a key that he pulled from the pocket of his
jeans.

“
What are
you going to do with all of those?” I asked.

He turned to me, the dim lights
flickering like flames in his eyes. “Like I said, who knows who’s left out
there? There are people like the raven killer, gone insane. I’d rather have
them here. Protection.” He began opening some of the boxes lined up against the
wall. “You like Spam? I hope so, because I have cartons of it.”

“
I’ll eat
it.”

He gathered up a few cans, placing
them on top of the teetering boxes before turning to a pile of plastic bags.
“It’s lucky that I found a camping store,” he said, his voice muffled. He came
up with two sleeping bags, still rolled in their cases. “We’re gonna need these
when night sets in.” He threw one to me; I was glad to see that it was a
single. “I have some air mattresses here as well. I’ll set them up after we
eat.” He ducked down again, coming up this time with a loaf of bread and
six-pack of beer.

We made rough sandwiches with the
bread and Spam, pulling chunks from the loaf with our fingers. Though Lucas had
managed to amass many essentials, it seemed that he had neglected cutlery. I
ate slowly, forcing the greasy mass down my throat with swigs of beer.

Lucas finished his food quickly, and
was starting on his third warm beer when I finished eating. “You usually wear
shoes like that?”

I looked down at the Guccis. “Yeah,
why?”

“
You’re not
going to be able to run around for long in them. They’re already blistering
your heels.”

Easing one shoe away from my foot, I
saw that he was right. A row of angry red blisters dotted my heel.

“
It’s okay,”
Lucas said. “We’ll get you some more tomorrow. I’ll buy you some,” he added,
laughing, the sound slightly blurred from the beer.

I retired to sleep as soon as
possible, inflating my air mattress with difficulty. Lucas watched me, but
didn’t offer to help, methodically finishing the six-pack of beer. I
deliberately set up my mattress on the far side of the lobby. When he set up
his mattress, he placed it directly next to mine.

When I woke it was dark, and Lucas
was gone, his sleeping bag shucked like a snake’s skin. I lay there for a
moment, disoriented by the silence before the pressure in my bladder forced me
to rise and seek a bathroom. I performed my ablutions rapidly, the chemical smell
of the water heavy in the still air.

The girl in the mirror was a
stranger, her face bare of makeup and dyed red hair limp around her shoulders.
Automatically I dug in my pockets and retrieved a tube of lipstick. I got as
far as rolling the tube up and placing it to my lower lip before dropping it in
the empty sink.

I dug into my pockets again, finding
loose change, a Metro card, credit card, my pager. Each item I dropped in the
sink, the change rattling against the porcelain like chains against bone. Last
of all, I drew out the piece of paper I had taken from the lobby of my
apartment building. This alone I replaced in my pocket.

I found Lucas out on the sidewalk,
smoking. He held out the packet to me wordlessly; I took one. When I inhaled
the smoke it tasted stale. He nodded towards the horizon. “You see that?”

A faint glow lit the sky. “The
sunrise?”

Lucas smiled. “The sun rises in the
other direction. That’s a fire. New York is burning.”

I shivered, cold despite the warmth
of the air.

Lucas threw the butt of his
cigarette to the pavement, where it smoldered balefully. “It’ll take the whole
city if no one stops it.” He pressed the heel of one boot onto the butt. “We
should get you some shoes. There’s a lot of broken glass around.”

We walked three blocks, me limping
in my heels. There we found a small discount store, the kind of place that I
would never have set foot in before. Lucas vanished upstairs, waving me towards
the women’s department where I picked out a pair of cheap trainers and thick
socks.

Lucas reappeared while I was lacing
up the new shoes, the Gucci heels discarded among a pile of dollar rubber
sandals. “Look what I found!” He brandished a plastic bag filled to the brim
with apples. All were perfect, identical and shining deep red. I took one and
bit into it.

The sweetness exploded in my mouth,
more delicious, it seemed, than anything I had tasted before. The second bite
revealed only twisted bitterness. I spat the bite out, Snow White in cheap
plastic shoes. The apple was black at the core, rotten. I lobbed it into the
midst of a display of cheap jewelry.

“
Bad luck,”
Lucas said. “Want another?”

I shook my head, nausea thick in my
throat. He shrugged, and polished off his own apple in quick bites, throwing
the core after my rotten one.

We walked back to the lobby, a task
made much easier by my new shoes. “So, what’s your plan?” Lucas asked.

“
My plan?” I
found myself looking towards the fire, turning back to see where the sun was
beginning to rise, staining the sky blood red. “I don’t know. Get out of New
York, go somewhere else.”

Outside the lobby, Lucas sat down on
the hood of a stalled cab, blithely ignoring the dead driver who leered at him
through the cracked windscreen. He reached into his bag and selected another
apple. “I was thinking of heading out to one of the military bases. If anyone’s
left alive, or has a cure, it’ll be there.” He bit into the apple, a wet
tearing sound. “You know, it’s entirely possible that they bred this thing, and
released it.” He took another bite, and spoke with his mouth full. “They did
that with AIDS, you know.”

I restrained myself from correcting
him. Most people might think that I’m just a dumb hooker, but even I knew that
what Lucas was saying was unfounded. “I have another idea,” I said, reaching
into my pocket and handing the journal entry to him.

He scanned it quickly, gulping down
the last of his apple and flinging the core over his shoulder. It landed in the
lap of a woman seated in a pink convertible, her blond hair still perfectly
coiffed around her withered face.

“
Grants
Pass?” Lucas asked. “You want to go clear across the country on the basis of
some girl’s diary?”

“
Someone put
these up in the lobby of my apartment building. Someone is going there at
least,” I said.

He twisted the paper in his hands
before folding it up and thrusting it into the pocket of his jeans. “Maybe it’s
part of the whole conspiracy. Maybe Grants Pass is a testing area.” He leapt
off the car, landing heavily on the pavement. “Why the hell not? It’s as good
as anywhere else.”

I watched him vanish into the gloom
of the lobby, restraining the urge to run after him and snatch the paper from
his pocket. As he vanished completely, a raven swooped down, air from its
passage lifting my hair. I looked up to watch it as it wove through the
buildings. In the distance, the raven’s mourning song began again.

****

Despite Lucas’ initial enthusiasm
for making the trip to Grants Pass, he didn’t make any plans to move. The
passing of days was measured with the waxing and waning of fires in different
parts of the city. It seemed that there was always an eerie glow on the
horizon, sometimes brighter than the sun itself. And always, there were ravens
in the sky, mourning.

I began collecting supplies for a
move, haunting army surplus and camping stores. I assembled my cache in an old
restaurant several streets away from the lobby in which Lucas and I spent
nights. This wasn’t by conscious choice. The first day I gathered a shopping
cart full of supplies, a raven swooped me as I tried to return it to the lobby.
It kept on swooping me, its beak eventually carving a thin strip of flesh from
my scalp until I turned away.

Lucas took to vanishing for days at
a time, returning with guns and ammunition, and eventually also maps. One day
when he returned to the lobby, he was dressed in army fatigues, the shirt open,
revealing a thin slice of pale skin. I shuddered when I saw him, afraid that
the name patch would read “Brown”, but instead it read “Singer”. Two guns were
holstered at his hips and he had shaved off his long dark locks, the tender
skin of his scalp strangely vulnerable.

To cover up my expeditions to gather
supplies, I had taken to raiding bookstores, returning to the lobby at night
with armfuls of reading material. I was reading
MacBeth
, propped up on a
pile of cushions on the sidewalk. Lucas tore the book from my hands without a
word before dragging me into the lobby.

Inside it was dark, the air rank.
Lucas had taken to hoarding what fresh produce he could find, and most of it
languished uneaten and rotting. Added to that was the sickly stench of human
effluvia; the toilets had blocked and overflowed.

Lucas threw me down on his mattress,
standing over me. The sleeping bag was thick with the sour scent of his sweat.
“It’s time you paid your debts,” he said, one hand curling around a gun. “I fed
you, let you stay here. You owe me.”

I didn’t argue at first. I didn’t
even protest when he pressed himself down against me, the acrid scent of his
unwashed body smothering.

But when his fingers fumbled at my jeans,
I screamed. I don’t know why I reacted how I did. I had done this many times
before with men far more repulsive. All it would take would be to blank out,
and when I woke it would be over. But I didn’t blank out. I fought. I scratched
at him, aiming for his eyes, stomach, groin. My bare feet were poor weapons, my
nails too short to be claws. He slapped away my blows as though they were
flies.

He managed to unclasp my jeans,
pulling them roughly away from my legs. My underwear followed suit, and I was naked
against the rough cloth of his stolen uniform. His flesh beneath it was heated,
almost feverish. His breath steamed at my throat, his chin heavy with stubble.

His fingers worked at his own fly,
and I screamed again. In that moment, I heard the mourning song of the ravens
again, and it was as though something possessed me. This thing twisted my body
against him, pressing my mouth against his and twined my free arm around his
waist, pulling him close.

Something other than me gripped the
gun still holstered at his waist, turned the gun up and pulled the trigger.

The sound exploded like a bomb, and
in its wake the ravens fell to silence.

I left him there, bleeding from his
belly. I took nothing with me but the journal entry that I retrieved from his
pocket, miraculously unstained by blood. The clothes he had torn from me I left
there, walking naked into the street.

There, an unkindness of ravens
waited. I nodded to them as I passed, and as one they rose and flew into the
darkness of the lobby. To Lucas’ credit, he didn’t scream once.

I began my pilgrimage to Grants Pass
naked, baptized in blood. The sky above was heavy with smoke, the sun a
tarnished disc. The concrete beneath my feet was cool, almost clammy, like the
skin of one of the corpses rotting in the street. The city was dead, decaying.
And I was dead, a ghost walking through the afterworld.