PostApoc (12 page)

The snow's already half a foot deep. Tara shivers. Her skin puckers from her ankles to her thighs. The girls of Salt step out behind us, trailed by the half-faced dancer. “Shit,” Jade says at the snow.

“Where you girls headed?” Leah asks. Without waiting for an answer, she says, “We might just stay in the club. You're welcome to join us.”

Tara's overheard whining, “I'm losing my buzz already.”

“Don't worry,” Jade says, her voice worn after tonight's singing. “We can fix you up—you got anything for us?”

Tara digs through her purse, spills its contents on the table. Jade picks through an amethyst ring, a hairbrush, an old set of keys. She takes the ring.

“I haven't had a new piece of jewelry in so, so long,” she says.

“My first boyfriend gave that to me,”
Tara says, face straight, voice emotionless.

The girl with half a face tells me her name is Hamilton. I can smell her breath when she speaks. She hooks a leg over my lap.

“I didn't dream until I was sixteen,” she says. “It started on the same night I stopped eating. I told a friend I was fat and she told me her sister's secret, that she'd lost seven pounds just by throwing up after dinner.

“When I stuck my fingernails down my throat and experienced life in reverse, that was when I really started living. I promised to never let food pass into me again, that all I'd ever crave would be the scrape of black nail polish on my tonsils.

“That first night, I dreamt of my possession, that the devil was in me and that he believed I could free him if I threw up hard enough. I always felt like I couldn't stand to be here for too long. Isn't that weird?”

“No,” I tell her. “I know exactly what you mean.”

Tara's fist slams against the table. “Ang!” she yells. “Watch this.” She's got two pills in her palm and pours both of them out on her tongue at the same time. Hamilton's leg is still firm over my own but her eyes have glazed, body quiet and suddenly half-asleep.

Tara and I have special powers. I figure as much because no one else seems to hear Tara and I talking. Maybe it's because our lips aren't moving. Our voices have transcended their physical processes.

“It's quiet enough that we could lucid dream,” Tara says. “Maybe that would bring back a piece of who I am, what I've forgotten.”

“You think you've forgotten much?” I ask.

“Enough.”

“Let's try to dream that the devil is here. Hamilton was talking about him earlier,” I say.

“I think to do that we have to focus on the number thirty-four, which also adds up to the number seven, which is lucky for everyone but me,” Tara says.

“Okay. And in this dream we're going to have, I am in an apartment, my own place. The devil's in the bathroom, rustling the shower curtain. I'm scared but I need to get in there because I have to get ready for work.”

“Once,” Tara says, “me and my friends tried to perform an exorcism. I can't remember why, but someone asked us to, this guy we kind of knew. So we went out to the woods and tried it, but it didn't work.

“That night, we all had the same dream: that we were back in the forest, trying to perform the exorcism again, except we lost all of our words. Like, we just couldn't remember how to talk anymore. I melted snow and turned it into holy water, hoping it would bring our words back, and it did. In my bag I had a prayer candle. Because it was something I'd bought for decoration and not for religious purposes, I didn't think it would work because it had the wrong intention behind it. I started the exorcism anyway. We all felt ready to finally have the devil gone. This was going to be a new start for us. But instead the devil only got stronger. We could hear him laughing in the trees. He thought it was funny that we were trying to turn things around when it was already way too late. We had no power because he already possessed us.”

The next day the sun's blazing again and the snow's gone. We step cautiously to test the temperature and find it hot already, likely swinging back to being unbearably warm.

Tara corners Jade just as we're about to step out, wanting to pick up another dose,
“to get through the day.” Aimee and I wait outside.

“How addictive is this shit?” Aimee wonders.

“Probably depends on the person, just like anything else.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Maybe you're right. I'm not craving anything, are you?”

“I can feel the comedown about to get worse,” I say. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I want some grayline, too. I don't mention this to Aimee.

There's food when we get back to the house, two raccoons and a small cat, their broken necks and bodies limp in Cam's and Trevor's hands. There's no blood on their hands or clothes, or on the animals. We don't ask how they killed these things. We don't breathe when we eat them, either, because we don't want to taste whatever disease they come with, or how close to decay they might have been when they died.

Cam's already thrown the innards and large bones to Taser, which is what he's named the canine beast now living with us. I ask if I can keep the pelts, for Shelley and Anadin. As a gift, an offering. Cam says I can only take them if I get rid of them right away. Says they'll attract animals if we hang onto them too long.

“Unless it gets cold again and stays cold,” he says. That way the temperature could be enough for the rot to keep from setting in. I drape the pelts on a dead radiator for now, skin side up.

Everyone wants to bathe today. Me and Tara and Aimee don't mention we snuck baths last night already.
We've all emptied our bowels since then and want another bath—you can only wipe yourself so clean with paper torn off telephone poles and old candy bar wrappers found under bushes. There's enough water to go around after last night's snow, though, so we go for it.

When it's my turn in the bathroom the sun against the window is yellow warmth. The water is lukewarm but I can pretend it's something luxurious.

Aimee's period pads are lined up in the windowsill, freshly washed again. We're all careful not to drop the soap in the tub or let it float in the water. Have to make it last as long as possible.

Despite the deep freeze overnight there are fruit flies in the air today. They mistake the soap for sustenance and float dead on their backs in the bath. I don't step out of the tub until I know there are no flies stuck to my body. Aimee offers up one of her t-shirts as a towel. The smell of her hair is embedded in the fabric. I wipe it over my waist, the backs of my arms, leaving traces of her all over me.

I wear Aimee's t-shirt out of the bathroom. It's just long enough to cover me to the tops of my thighs. In our bedroom, Tara's crouching on her mattress.

“I've got other pieces of the past I'd rather have back,” she says. Her eyes are spinning, higher than last night. “But I'll take what I can get for now. I have to accept that because I accepted the name Valium and nothing was ever the same after that. Did I accept the demonic?” she asks.

My heart drops, even though the answer is no.

“This is a bonus round for me,” she continues. “It all came to me just as I was cleaning up, which was also kind of like waking up. I'm so afraid to lose it again that I wrote it down. See?” She points to a scrap of paper pinned to the wall with an animal's tiny bone:

Poetry was smeared on the mirror:

Who dreams in figures

1234
times plus
9
plus
4
equals

1111
.

Big dreams in a miniature ghost world
.

“I don't get it,” I tell her.

“It doesn't matter,” she says. “A few people have already told me about my aura today. They said it's glowing.”

“Who told you that?” I ask.

“Oh, you missed them,” she says. “They're already gone.”

Later, I ask Cam who dropped by, but he says no one was here.

- 19 -
CULT OF SKULLS

S
omeone's been painting sugar skulls onto pieces of wood and nailing them to telephone poles. Their neon orange and green and pink grins bare at me on my way to the beach, bringing pelts to Shelley and Anadin. I can't tell if the skulls are meant to watch over us or if they're just watching.

When I left the house Tara was crawling, convinced she'd dropped a dose of grayline and that it was now wedged between the floorboards.

“Someone must have taken it then,” she said when we told her we didn't lose any.

“Yeah, someone did,” Cam said, and Tara glared up. “You.”

She was on her feet her, then, lunging. He'd pushed her hard enough that she fell backwards, tailbone coming down against the hardwood. I slipped out then, not wanting anyone to notice where I was going, not even telling Aimee I was leaving for a while. There are some things I want to keep separate from the dirt and stress I live in.

There are also some things I want to get away from today. I've taken the house's moody energy with me in the form of a stomachache, which I'll leave on the beach, hopefully.

“I don't think that's the only reason you're hurting,” Anadin tells me when I arrive. They've laid me down on their couch, which has sand between the cushions and springs poking into my back. Still, it's close enough to comfortable that I start to relax as Anadin rubs my stomach in small circles.

She looks into my eyes for a moment and nods, like she knows something I haven't told her. Can she see last night's hangover? Can she see I'm afraid of the cravings I'm starting to have? Any addiction before The End would have been hard enough to live through; now, though, without any reliable supplies or steady currencies, without any predictability of what grayline can really do, it's terrifying. But I don't say this out loud.

“When you hold the wrong things in, they spread their energy throughout your body,” she says.

“It's true,” Shelley says. “Whether you say it or not, your anger and anxiety and other emotions have to go somewhere if you don't let them out.”

I've been giving myself and my stories away to the wrong people, for the wrong reasons. Even as I realize this, I know I won't stop.

Shelley and Anadin sit on the floor beside me while I run through every scrap of the past that I can with them:

—Me and Aimee, riding our bikes to the beach, this same beach, back when it was still alive. The backs of our arms were burning up in the midafternoon sun, but we didn't care. It felt good to be warm then.

—Too much time trying to forget pieces of ourselves that we'd ended up blanking out the wrong slates of awareness.

—Finally waiting for the confidence to admit to things I'd never wanted to acknowledge before. Just feeling ready to accept this was significant.

—A flash of Hunter's voice, something that once made me melt: “Before we'd ever talked I used to see you around and I'd want to scoop my hand into your liver, heart, lungs and pull whatever was left to the surface. I wanted to help you bring it all back. I could see it there, behind your eyes. You tried to wear it like apathy but I could see it was something else.” Would I have done the same for him? Would he still feel that way now?

—When I moved back home from Vancouver, my mom, regardless of where I'd been the night before, would lay out red flannel shirts and wool socks for me on winter mornings while I was in the shower. I'd keep my hair wet and sit with her in the kitchen. She'd make grilled cheese and baked beans. I'd pour on too much ketchup. She'd sip black tea and watch me eat and we'd both pretend like nothing ever happened.
The hardest thing to think of right now is that there was love in that house.

—In the den, TV on, stretched out on the couch with a blanket. Dad in his chair, reading the newspaper. I'd flip channels. It was Sunday morning. There was nothing on except gospel choirs and prayer sessions. We both fell asleep to hundreds of pairs of hands raised above us, praying, praising. Close to dreaming, I thought it was a sign—of safety. Of being saved. Of better things.

When I go over these points, I think of Hunter. Wish for an alternate outcome. Wish he was still here. Send him this message, in case he's listening: “Without you I need more air than I used to.”

I pause, hang my head over the arm of the couch, away from Anadin and Shelley, to dry heave.

“Are you still full?” Anadin asks.

“From everything before?” Shelley adds.

“If you let one more thing stay inside of you, would you spill open?”

“Let it out,” they both say together.

—I imagine that you are still here. When I am outside I think about the way the wind picked at your hair. I remember how you used to keep your hand on my neck to protect me from the cold. We used to hide in doorways in the rain, sharing cigarettes under your jacket. I'd hold the filter to your mouth and you'd kiss the palm of my hand to thank me.

Shelley and Anadin hold up the pelts, which I couldn't keep from rotting after all. The skin-side of the hides is blackening at the edges. The smell is something like the oldest tooth in a bad mouth. Shelley and Anadin have admiration for the pelts anyway.

“We can work with them,” Shelley says.

“But first, we still have to work with you,” Anadin says.

“I thought we were done,” I say.

There could be love
here
, in this house, too. If I find a way to keep this beach house all for myself, protect it from the rest of what my life has become.

Outside, in the light, I see that one of Anadin's eyes has turned husky blue, a contrast against its original deep brown. Chunks of her hair have gone white, almost translucent, streaks like underwater tentacles.

“Light a cigarette,” she says. “It's a compromise. We'll cleanse by fire.”

Shelley speaks: “There are old power lines, below the earth. They've gone tentative, but are still sending us signals.
Visions. We see one for you, Ang, but it's not the right time to tell you.”

“Is the vision just for me, or for my friends, too?”

“Just for you,” Shelley says. “Just for you.”

Anadin speaks: “This city's turning into a cult of skulls. You must have seen them on your way here.”

Shelley chants, weaves these words as subtext. The skull: a mythology. Sacred to luck. Flesh and soul and intellect. Protector of death. Resurrection. Captivate. Calaveras. Day of the Dead. Skulls that were considered lucky. Dead dolls with skulls for heads. Empty eye sockets tattooed to inner arms. That luck isn't here anymore. There is nothing demonic, nothing divine here. Only everything in between: ghosts and raw nerves and miles of despair. Memento mori. Gothic disaffection.

Anadin speaks: “The skulls signal that the swing of the pendulum is starting to slow, stop. You will start to dream. It will be dark inside those dreams. Darker than the ones you know now, and full of predators. Things that grab at ankles, hands up your shirt. When you wake in the morning you'll want to hear that someone still knows you, remembers who you were before. But sometimes it feels like there are just so many words on top of words that they're all backed up. Sometimes all you can do is skim off the surface instead of pulling from the bottom of the pile, where the real words got buried.”

They walk me down the beach and bend me over behind a big rock. I feel my insides rise right away. “I can't handle being sick anymore,” I tell them.

“You'll make it through,” they say, as the first wave comes up. I throw up a tube of lipstick. The cap comes off and the smear of colour inside is burnt orange. They rub my back through another contraction—out comes an empty charm bracelet. I pant through the pain my chest. My head swims again and out comes a trail of charms.
They scatter across the sand. A cramp crosses my entire abdomen, from the right side to the left. I have to get on all fours for this one. Shelley and Anadin hang on to my shoulders now, brush hair back from my face as I feel fur and bone pass the wrong way over my tongue. The snout of a raccoon falls out, fur partially torn from the bone, a row of teeth and broken whiskers hanging on.

I could suffocate, can't catch my breath. “Breathe through it,” Anadin says, as though she knows what I'm feeling without being able to tell her.

I get a hold of a decent inhalation and let it out slowly. The pain leaves me. No cramps, no stomachache. I breathe in again to make sure the absence is real. It is.

The sun feels good, makes me want to stay out of the house. I swing by to see if Aimee and Tara want to stay out with me but they're not around when I get there. I head back out alone again and ride.

There's a park down the street from here, but when I pull closer I find a group of men there. Their heads swing in my direction, as if they've caught my scent. I put a hand over the knife in my pocket, just needing the reassurance it's there. I keep riding.

“You still hanging around here?” This is the question that makes me jump at the Mission, but the voice makes me stay; it's too familiar.

Tooth comes out from under the stage, walks towards me. I haven't heard anything about the Shit Kitten guys since their show at the brick factory.

We're in each other's arms. “What are you doing here?” I ask.

“Thinking about doing another show,” he says. “It'll probably be our last.”

“Why?”

He tells me that the skulls going up around town are a marker of the final days for the city. “You know how the electricity still sometimes buzzes on? Well, it's really going to be over soon. Next time it goes off, it's off for good.”

Tooth tells me there's a skull at the city's center where everyone's heart used to beat from. In its place now is a skull on a hypnotist's spiral, in the center of its forehead an all-seeing eye in a pyramid.

“This whole place is a public altar, all of it,” he says. “The skulls are feeding off whatever's left of this city's spiritual essence. They're feeding off whoever is still out there.”

Tooth tells me of sepulchral lamps below the subway, where the train tunnels have been turned into catacombs. At least that's what he heard. With bands, the myth is always better than the reality. I listen anyway, choose to believe that anyone not disappeared, only dead, has been thrown into piles below the streets. By who, exactly, he's not sure.

“When this city was alive you could feel the trains pulling in under your feet,” he says. “If you were standing in the right place at the right time you could feel the city shudder with the thrill of steel and sparking tracks as the trains wormed through it.”

It's true. There was magic here.

“There still is,” he says.

Except now the city squeezes out hollowed groans of gaping skulls, the agonized wind tunnels of a subterranean spirit world. This will be the urban legend for the apocalyptic generation, that any energy left is being funneled below.
The dead need a light at the end of their tunnel and they are going to use ours to get it. Now, with every step we take, we will do it with the dead in mind, imagine that their mouths are hanging long and low in mock horror as they send shivers through us all.

“How do you even know that you can be heard over a death chant?” I ask.

“Guess we'll find out at the show, won't we?” Tooth says.

Cam's dog is in the house. At least that's what I'm thinking as I pull into the driveway. The sun's going down, fast. There are a few candles already lit in the windows.

The howling follows me to the mudroom at the back. I don't know why I'm running inside when I feel like I should be running back out to the street, but here I am anyway.

I get through the kitchen and that's when the sound changes enough to know it's not Taser. It's a girl. My head runs through the possibilities, of course goes to Aimee and Tara first.

Cam and Trevor and Brandy are in the living room, circled around Carrie, who's on the floor. Someone's shoved the coffee table off to the side. Or maybe that's where it's been since Cam shoved Tara across the room earlier.

Everyone's talking in quick whispers, tones blended with fear and urgency and tepid reassurance. I'm thinking I should offer to help in some way but don't even know what's going on, so I keep a few steps back, in case they think I'm intruding. Maybe I
am
intruding.

Carrie's in her leather jacket and lace bra, her usual wear. Someone's put a blanket beneath her.

Brandy meets my eyes. “Is she sick?” I ask.

“I don't know,” she says. Her eyebrows unite in worry.

Carrie's covered in sweat. Brandy breaks my gaze to get Carrie's jacket off. I've never seen her without it before, not even on the hottest days. Her arms are a network of tattoos she's kept hidden: an anatomical heart, a skull, a spider web on her elbow. Things Hunter would have sneered at and called typical. I see a pentagram on her bicep, a row of names and dates, a black and white portrait of a woman with long dark hair.