I just want to go home. I can’t stop running that phrase through my mind. It is my mantra, and I walk in rhythm to the cadence. Nevermind that there is no home anymore, or that I barely had one before all this. What’s mine is yours and vice-versa, whether you like it or not. It’s a brave new world, baby, and it’s a hard one. I don’t think I’ll write another entry after this. The cataracts are getting worse, and I can barely hold this stub of a pencil anyway. Besides, who’s gonna read it?
Last night I stayed at a warehouse. It was one of the good ones, with guards and a loading-dock entrance set to lock up tight at 8 pm.The guard at the gate was fat. He asked why I should be allowed to stay the night so I gave him two cans of ravioli, one of them with extra meat. I’m more of a chicken noodle man myself. He looked me up and down with an air of rehearsed ceremony and waved me through. A girl with shimmering hair and empty eyes led me through a dimly lit corridor and showed me to a refrigerator box laid out flat on the floor. She leaned against the wall beside the cardboard square with one hand on her hip and asked if I wanted anything else. I said no, thank you, although If you could send room service around I sure wouldn’t mind a menu. She rolled her eyes and sauntered off. I only had most of a six pack left anyway. I closed my eyes to the dull roar of a gasoline-powered generator and was asleep.
New Years was the last real night before it all fell apart. Quarantines were in effect out west but martial law hadn’t been declared yet, and I was with my friends. We didn’t take it seriously. We didn’t take anything seriously. Jimmy’s dad had rented us a hotel room for the night, and that was all that mattered. We were on the top floor with a beachfront view and we were truly, desperately alive. We had everything we needed, and when that ran out Mike and Thomas stole a few cases from a Super Saver down the street. Skippy fucked some girl in the lobby and then Davis did, too. I spent half the night in the bathroom with Ellie, doing lines and laughing about times we’d done lines in other bathrooms. She was wearing that cheap mall perfume that reeks of teenage nights spent sneaking out of my bedroom window and into someone else’s and that’s what I remember most. We kissed for the first time when the ball dropped and The Chainsmokers crackled through a blown speaker and everyone said they knew it would happen, they knew it would happen, hahaha. It’s August now, and they’re probably all dead. Sometimes I still dream but I never dream of them.
The fat guard nudged me awake before sunrise and said time to go, faggot. My throat was starting to swell and I could feel blood cresting around my molars. The girl who had shown me to my square was on a cot a few yards away, practically underneath an older guy in the remnants of what might have been Armani once. On the floor beside them sat two cans of tuna and three Bud tallboys. High Roller. I gathered my meager bits and packed my Jansport and shuffled back through the corridor and out into the gray predawn. I didn’t dare spit until I was through the gate. I couldn’t look at it, but I felt it. Thick and gritty. I was definitely on the way out. Sayonara, suckers, catch ya on the flipside. I didn’t mind too much. I’d already made it a lot longer than most and everyone knew it was only a matter of time anyway, even if they didn’t like to talk about it. I cracked the first of my last four beers and headed east. I figured I’d make it to the park before the sun if I hurried. I don’t remember much of the first few months. I doubt anyone who survived the initial impact does. The first things to get knocked over were the liquor stores, and then the dope dens. Most of the hardcore junkies were dead or dying long before the first string survivors kicked in their doors, left to their own devices. It’s funny what people fall back on first when there’s no one left to judge them. February through about May were an absolute blur. I remember house parties in apartment complexes where the dividing walls had all been broken down. I remember going to a drive-in theater in some guy’s backyard and watching Snuff films projected onto sewn together bed sheets while me and some dude named Clint or Clive or something smoked about an ounce of weed and talked about the last bands we’d seen and the last times we’d gotten laid. I saw a too-thin dead girl with a broken arm and her jeans bunched up around her high tops in front of a bus bench that said TODAY IS THE DAY! YOUR FUTURE BEGINS NOW. I saw a group of kids who had raided a zoo riding an Honest-to-God elephant down the stripmall. I saw an entire Walmart burn to the ground. I saw sunflowers someone had planted in the rain gutters of every single house in some gated community. There really was a sort of ruined beauty to it, sometimes, in between the glowing windstorms and the acid rain.
I saw the first sign just as the sky started to turn from that dull gray to a faint blue. Magic Hour, I heard the film buffs call it. Something about how a camera catches the light, maybe. There weren’t exactly any around to ask. WELCOME TO STONE MOUNTAIN PARK! ENJOY YOUR STAY. The trail was about a mile to the top, and it was steep. The tunnel vision was getting worse, but The Aches hadn’t set in yet. I’d spent most of my summers growing up here, and I’d climbed the mountain a dozen times before. I’d race my brother to the top and we’d spit over the guardrail and he’d say look out below, Geronimo, here it comes. I opened my second Busch and headed toward the trail.
Before any of this was even a blip on The Average American Radar I hadn’t been much. A community college dropout with minimal plans and nothing but time. I shared an apartment with a few friends and spent most of my nights going from bar to bar, looking for something or someone to do. Nothing mattered, then. At least this year I had something to worry about, and there was a sort of sideways comfort in that. In June I met a poor sap who had been a straight up heart surgeon before the free world went belly up, and I sat with him as he cried with a needle in his arm about his old life and when he’d had a purpose and people who relied on him and a family whom he’d loved so much, so much. I couldn’t relate, and I didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t either. We were all just passing time.
When I was a kid I heard dogs always face East before they die. I didn’t understand it, then, but maybe I do now as I squint into the Georgia sunrise with a pocket full of my own teeth. Stone Mountain stands about 1,600 feet above sea level, and If my eyes weren’t so yellowed I could see Atlanta from here. I have two cans of Busch left, and I intend to enjoy them. The spaces between my earlobes and my neck are beginning to ache something fierce, but I am going to enjoy this. 1,600 feet.
I wish I’d brought a pair of sunglasses.
Submitted March 04, 2017 at 02:35PM by Steez_Whiz http://ift.tt/2mmtZoB shortscarystories
No comments:
Post a Comment