Chapter Four #3
I grip the machete tightly as I walk through the reeking apartment, eyes flickering from left to right. This time, I see the figure barrel out of the shadows for me. Samson, his beer belly even bigger now. Distended. His eyes shine white-blue in the dark apartment, arms outstretched.
I’m ready for him.
I heave my side, pack first, straight into his oncoming form. It knocks him off course. His body crashes into the sound system, and Chumbawamba’s “Tubthumping” begins to play once more.
Jesus. What is it with this song?!
I hover over him, willing him to not get knocked down and get up again as I gear up to swing my machete down hard enough to separate Samson’s giant head from the mere inch of his exposed neck. But, as the soprano starts crooning about pissing the night away, I falter.
Can I do this? I don’t even like to squash spiders.
Then I see the leg lying on the floor.
Just a leg, severed at the calf and ending in a hot-pink running shoe that, I’m fairly sure, belongs to the woman from 2G. Dana, maybe? When we passed each other in the hall yesterday morning, she definitely had all of her appendages.
The realization that Tyler and Samson probably pulled her from her apartment sometime last night and ate her clicks, and something else takes over. Not anger, or fear, or even disgust. More like…resolve. Motivation. A to-do list you’re ready and able to tackle.
That’s my baby girl, Mom says. It’s survival time.
As the Chumbawamba man starts listing various alcoholic beverages, I bring the machete down hard and simultaneously learn what Samson’s severed spine looks like, up close and personal.
When the rest of Dana from 2G crawls out of the shadows toward me on hands and stumps, hissing and snarling with her own headlamp eyes, I dispatch her easily as well.
Poor Dana. She’d be lost without running, anyway.
I grab my suitcase, and together we roll effortlessly out of 2F, my apartment building, and my nothing-of-a-life to date.
Turns out, it’s easier to say goodbye than I thought.
T Minus Four Minutes
Until Shit Hits the Fan
Everett
Fuck. I scrub my face with my palms, then rake my fingernails through my scruffy beard.
Maisie’s a doomsday prepper.
I knew she seemed a little culty, but beyond all the weirdness, Maisie was so…
nice. Real. Unabashedly, unapologetically herself.
It stood out compared to how today, everyone seems so edited.
Filtered pictures. Botoxed foreheads. Carefully curated houses on display.
People live more of their lives on social media than they do in the real world, and the gimmicks of one slowly bleed into the other until nothing feels quite real.
After Louise died, I couldn’t keep up with it, and the world kept scrolling on without me.
A few years out of the game, and I don’t know how to connect with people at all anymore.
What pictures would I post? The piles of Louise’s things I can’t bear to box up?
The same sad bus route I’ve taken to work at the university every day for years?
A yellow-leafed tree, captioned I feel like I died, too?
That’d get me followers.
Had it been me on that app, I’d never have scored a date with Maisie, and Sandeep knew that.
But somehow, in person, it didn’t matter.
She brought me out of the fog I spend my days in, luring me not with some artificial presentation of her interests but by the emotions she provoked within me.
Empathy. Delight. And, eventually, a scorching, mind-bending desire that came out of freaking nowhere.
I exhale harshly as I exit her building.
I haven’t kissed a woman since Louise died, haven’t even considered it, to be honest. Not that a few haven’t tried.
There’s a whole cadre of women out there who find grief-tortured widowers attractive.
But those tender-eyed women who’d press their numbers into my hands at faculty functions, or bars, and, that one time, in the checkout line at the grocery store were just as muted and gray as the rest of my life, barely distinguishable from the surroundings.
But Maisie walked in through the door in wild, vivid Technicolor, immediately set off from the rest, and she grew more so with every awkward remark, every blunt statement, every embarrassed blush, until I found it hard to look anywhere else.
She caught my attention the way nothing else has in years.
And she’s a doomsday prepper.
I shove my hands deep into the pockets of my peacoat, bracing against the bitter winds picking up. The sirens that sang out during our doomed dinner are eerily silent now, as if all the first responders have gone on collective strike. A keen feeling of unease brews in my belly.
The screech of tires ahead makes me glance up. A Chevy Spark veers onto the sidewalk, braking abruptly, and a man jumps out from the driver’s seat.
I blink. Jaxon? My Lyft driver?
Grinning with relief, I start to yell for him to give me a ride home, but my voice dies in my throat as Jaxon pulls the passenger out of the back seat by the collar and begins to club him with that shiny metal baseball bat.
Three decisive strikes, then Jaxon jumps back in his car and peels away.
Jesus! I run for the man downed on the sidewalk. “Sir? Sir!”
It’s an older man, seventies maybe. His coat is covered in vomit, the skin beneath his spectacles gray and bruised. His head is dented in from Jaxon’s bat, and I hold a hand to my mouth as the gag rises in my throat.
His eyes flick open. They are strangely bright.
I take a step back. “Uh, sir? Are you all right?”
He stares at me blankly. He’s confused, probably damn near brain-dead after the beating he just took. I lean down, tentatively offering my hand to help him up.
The stranger answers by baring his teeth in an open-mouthed snarl, then grabs me by the lapels of my coat.
He comes at me with a wild headbutt, gaping mouth aiming for my nose.
I shriek as his bright eyes loom closer, a freaky, silvered blue that consumes the entire space between his wrinkled lids.
I twist out of his reach right before he takes a chunk out of my face.
“What the fuck, sir!”
I take off running as the old man scrabbles after me.
Despite the lies Sandeep spouted to Maisie in the app, I don’t work out.
I used to play an extremely mean game of pickleball with Louise, but I haven’t lifted or exercised regularly in years, and I definitely don’t run.
Yet that’s what I’m doing right now down the dark streets of downtown Durham, chased by an old guy who may be an X-Man?
Unclear. My beat-up leather oxfords aren’t meant for this, and my heels scream in protest as the skin tears and bleeds.
I cut down a dark alley, hobbling up an old fire escape.
I yank the ladder up after me, but it refuses to budge more than halfway.
The groan of rusty metal echoes horribly between the brick buildings, and I scoot back into the shadows on its platform, horrified that I’ve just put myself in a corner I can’t escape.
But the X-Man doesn’t clock the noise’s source.
He disappears down the main thoroughfare. My pulse hammers in my neck.
That…that wasn’t normal. That man. His eyes. He tried to—was he going to bite me?
Everett: I just got…I don’t know. Assaulted? By an X-Man? His eyes were crazy glowing bright, and I know it sounds crazy, but I don’t think he was breathing.
Everett: Sandeep? You okay, man?
Everett: Sandeep?
The little red flag on my call button screams 17. I’ve missed seventeen calls from both my parents and Gemma? What the fuck is going on?
I open up my text messages and start scanning through what I’ve missed.
Gemma: Where are you?
Colonel Hank Greer: Son. It is imperative for you to call your mother.
Gemma: Why aren’t you answering your phone?
Colonel Irene Greer: Your father and I need to debrief with you by 2200 hours. Comply.
Gemma: You’re not sick, are you??? Mom and Dad are going apeshit!
Colonel Hank Greer: You are upsetting your mother!
Wow. Dad used an exclamation point? This really is serious.
Gemma: CALL ME IMMEDIATELY! It’s extremely important!!!
Before I can think of a single thing to write back, my phone screen darkens, out of battery, and I groan. What the hell is going on?
Is it the virus? Does my family know something I don’t?
From my perch up high, I can just make out the top of Sandeep’s condo the next block over. I’m close.
I just have to get to Sandeep’s. Avoid the goblin-people. Charge my phone. That’s it.
Terror follows me like a cloud as I slink through the shadows the last of the way to his condo. I nearly weep with relief as I retrieve the spare key from the flowerpot and let myself in.
“Sandeep?” I call up the stairs. The living room is the same as it ever was, save for the pile of blankets and puke bucket by the couch.
Judging by the smell, it’s been used. I cover my nose with my arm.
“It’s me, Everett.” My desire not to wake him if he’s sleeping is countered by my stronger desire to tell him everything that’s happened.
I check the bottom floor, but he’s not in the kitchen, hall bath, or living room.
I shrug off my peacoat and settle down in an armchair to untie my oxfords, wincing as my socks pull off sticky bits of me with them.
His first aid kit is probably upstairs, in the big bathroom off his bedroom.
I pad lightly up the stairs, the wood sighing with each footstep.