“And that means this Sunday is…” She watched him, waiting.
“Yep,” he said. “Father’s Day.”
Marie sat straight up, the tangles of hair falling away from her lined face. “I know where Big Karl is.”
SLEEP CAME IN FITS and starts to Junior that night. Tomorrow, Marie would lead him to their father. Junior had not seen Big Karl since the day of the Great Awakening, just over a year ago.
Junior was returning home from his shift at the printing press, a grueling 16-hour workday with no breaks. He shared a dank two-bedroom apartment with Marie and his mother and father. Big Karl no longer had a respectable vocation. Once a firefighter, he now came and went days at a time, and at all hours. He had grown secretive and strange, near incoherent much of the time. And violent. Mother’s face bore evidence of that, as did Marie’s.
A blow to the jaw dazed Junior as he stepped into the apartment, a heavy blast from something thick and metal that embedded bits of broken molars into his cheek and tongue. When he opened his eyes, the world was on its side. Marie and mother both sat on the floor, cowering and bleeding. They cried, but Junior heard nothing save the ringing in his ears.
“This is it!” Big Karl crossed in front of him, shouting, waving an axe around. He dropped to a knee and cocked his head sideways to look into Junior’s eyes. “Are you ready, boy?”
He spun the axe in his hands, waiting for an answer. “You ain’t ready,” he said. “You ain’t prepared to do your part. You never were with me.”
Junior coughed and spit out broken teeth. Somewhere nearby, an explosion rocked the apartment building and pieces of ceiling board dropped to the floor in dusty plumes.
“Hear that?” Big Karl threw back his head and whooped loudly. His eyes flared with insanity. “This is finally IT! The day is here!”
Junior’s father turned and kicked Marie in the chest with a heavy work boot, sending the slight girl hard into the wall. She slumped to her left and did not move. Big Karl turned to Junior’s mother and screamed at her with inhuman rage. She stared up at him in shock, a vacant look on her face. She never flinched, even as Big Karl raised the axe above his head and brought it down on her with all the force he could muster. The blade split the top of her skull with a meaty thock, pushing her head down between her shoulder blades. The sharp snap of her neck bounced off the walls of the close apartment like a thunderclap and the weight of the axe pulled her forward until the handle hit the floor. Her head wobbled on her shoulders like her neck was filled with gelatin and she slumped sideways until it came to rest against Marie’s leg.
Big Karl turned away from his wife and stomped around in a circle, still whooping maniacally. It was as though he was bursting from the inside with gallons of adrenaline, or perhaps some potent drug racing through his veins. His eyes bulged and veins stood out along his temples and forearms like virulent earthworms burrowing beneath his skin.
Junior’s senses slowly returned as he lay there. The Pulaski lay on the floor next to the rest of his father’s forgotten firefighting equipment. Big Karl stopped at the opposite wall, his back to them, grunting and growling and punching holes through the drywall. Junior wiggled his extremities, making sure he could still feel them. He reached for the Pulaski and stumbled to his feet, a shower of sparks exploding in his vision.
Big Karl pummeled the wall, leaving bloody streaks on the edges of the holes, while mumbling, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” He turned and took a step forward but stopped when he saw Junior, wobbly on his feet, the Pulaski high in the air. Big Karl sidestepped just enough, a slight tilt back and to the right, so the axe-end of the Pulaski just missed his face. He brought his left hand up to catch it, but instead the blade landed in the meat between his middle and ring fingers, and did not stop until it struck the top of his radius bone at the wrist.
Blood sprayed from the wound and covered Junior. It ran in his eyes and he staggered back, wiping at them. When he could see again, Big Karl was gone, the Pulaski on the floor in a pool of red. Junior stood in the middle of the apartment listening to the intensifying chaos outside, the Great Awakening whipping up toward a crescendo. He swayed on his feet and tried to maintain consciousness.
He had no idea how long he stood there. The next image he could recall was sitting on the floor, blood from his broken mouth splatting on the carpet between his legs. Marie’s screams barely registered in his mind. She pulled at his arms and spoke to him, and the memory of her tear-streaked face as she dragged him out of the apartment clouded his mind as he tried once more to sleep.
The world changed that day, a little over a year ago, April 23rd, the Venerated Day of the Great Awakening on the Hallmark calendar. The one-year anniversary “celebration” had lasted more than a month, but with so many holidays in between, it was impossible to tell when one excuse for bedlam ended and the next began. The world was an orgy of violence and destruction and lawlessness, but only one of the 365 holidays mattered at all to Junior now.
Father’s Day was tomorrow.
IN THE MONTH AFTER the Great Awakening, Junior lost track of Marie. It was a dark time that he found more difficult to remember with each passing day, as though none of it much mattered after what Big Karl had done to them. He spent most of the last twelve months lost, above ground and below, where many sought a respite from the depravity topside, but found only a darker version had sprouted up underground. Once Junior knew what he would do, he had searched for weeks until he found Marie, in an abandoned subway tunnel that had been repurposed as a marketplace for vice. He barely recognized her at first. She looked like an old black-and-white photographic version of herself.
“You’ll have to move the cover,” she said, rousing him from his mind fog. “It’s too heavy for me.”
Junior climbed the slick ladder to the sewer grate and pressed against it, using all of his strength to lift the heavy iron disk and slide it away enough so they could pass. He clambered up and then reached back to aide his sister.
He stood and looked around the alley, listening to the din of random gunfire and shouting male voices on a nearby main street. The day’s revelry was beginning again. “I haven’t been topside in some time,” he said.
“Neither have I.” Marie looked around nervously, checking the dark corners and doorways along the alley that the waning afternoon sun failed to penetrate.
When she turned back to Junior, he was gone. “Junior?” “Hey, baby.”
A drunk appeared from a doorway behind her and stumbled up the alley, his left foot dragging along the ground, disturbing the trash and sodden ticker tape from forgotten parades. Marie backed away, eyes darting around for something to defend herself with.
“Where you going, bitch?”
Before she could respond, Junior sprang from behind a flipped-over dumpster, the Polack a blur through the air. The sharpened tip entered the back of the drunk’s neck and burst through the other side. He froze for a moment, his eyes bulging. The liquor bottle in his left hand clattered to the ground as he clawed at his throat, his mouth opening and closing silently like a dying fish. Junior put a foot in the small of the man’s back and kicked him forward, off of the Polack. Blood coated the cracked brick wall to his right as if it had been dispensed from a paint sprayer. Junior picked up the liquor bottle, wiped the mouth with his shirt, and held it up to the light to see its contents. Then he drained what liquid had not spilled on the ground and tossed the empty bottle on top of its former owner.