“This must be City,” Pym says.
I pull her away from the edge, feeling cold and vaguely disappointed. She’s right.
This must be City, but where are the people? Where is the civilization Bill spoke so much about? All gone. Dead, I suppose.
Pym and I walk to the other side of the rooftop, where an open doorway leads into the building like a tight black mouth.
We walk down some stairs until we come to a red door.
We open the red door, which leads down some more dark stairs, which lead to another red door, which leads to more dark stairs, which lead to another red door, which leads to more dark stairs, which leads to a white door that looks as if it is made of clouds.
“Do you remember playing Cloud Castle?” Pym asks.
I open the cloud door and pass through the doorway first. I’m not ready to confess to her how much our little games still mean to me. I want that to be a special moment. Maybe we can play Cloud Castle again, now as adults with a real future together.
We both gasp as we look around at the things piled in the room. I’d half-expected the doors to continue leading to staircases forever, but the cloud door has led us somewhere special. We’re in a room stacked wall to wall, floor to ceiling, with magical glittery packages marked FOOD.
We will finally eat what people eat. We will finally eat a meal that isn’t made of people.
“Do you think it’s safe to eat?” Pym asks.
“Of course,” I say. “It’s food, isn’t it?”
She flashes a skeptical smile and kisses me on the cheek before moving toward the nearest wall of packaged foodstuffs. It takes us a few minutes to figure out how to open the packages, then we’re tearing them open as fast as we can manage, examining the food before casting it aside.
We’re too afraid to put any of this stuff in our mouths. The food looks so strange and unfamiliar, but the packages are so much fun to open.
“Wait,” Pym says. “This seems wasteful. For all we know, this is the last food in all of City. We can’t burn through our whole supply. Why don’t we gather up the food we think looks best and then have a feast? It will be like a wedding feast.”
“Our wedding feast?” I ask.
“Our wedding feast,” she says.
“You’re not mad at me for everything that happened?”
She smiles. “Anything you’ve done, I’ve done worse.”
We turn back to our separate scavenging, inspecting the foods we’ve already discarded, opening new packages in hopes of discovering something that looks as familiar as a human heart. After a while, we’ve stockpiled a heaping mound of foodstuffs on the floor. We’re kind of bored of searching too. And hungry.
We sit down cross-legged beside each other and examine the food pyramid. I pick up a round, spongy dark thing that smells like sweat. “Let’s both try one at the same time,” I say.
Pym nods and picks up a flat, jagged yellow thing speck-led on top with tiny crusted teardrops. We raise the human food to our mouths and bite down at the same time.
I chew the spongy dark thing, not enjoying the alien texture at all. The taste is even worse.
We spit out the horrible foodstuffs at the same time, retching and wiping our tongues with our hands.
“This shit is horrible,” Pym says.
“I agree. Hold on a moment. I think I’m going to vomit.” I stand up and stagger toward a stack of food packages that serves as a wall sectioning off a private little area of the room.
I pull down my pants out of Pym’s view. I need to shit real bad.
When I’m done with my business, I pull up my pants and look down at the pile of shit on the floor. There’s a piece of paper stuck in the shit. I bend down to see it better.
“What are you doing over there? It smells horrible,” Pym calls.
The thing sticking out of my shit is the letter she wrote to me and then chewed up and swallowed right before she was married off to Bill. I pry the letter shard out of my shit and wipe it off on the floor. When it’s clean, I read the words, curious to know what fragment of her work chanced survival. I laugh a little to myself. My heart feels good. Alone in this strange room with Pym, with no direction home, life is beautiful.
I return to where she sits beside the pile of inedible crap, wishing we had some hearts or brains to eat.
I hand her this shit-stained scrap of paper that says I love you. Rather than a desperate confession or a funny kid thing to say, it feels true this time. It feels like a new beginning.
THE ROADKILL QUARTERBACK OF HEAVY METAL HIGH
Chapter One
Danny the werewolf took off his headphones mid-Holy Diver as he walked into first period. The other students were playing the final air guitar notes of Heavy Metal High’s Alegiance to Death. He sat at a desk in the back of the classroom beside Barbetta, head cheerleader and girlfriend of Moose Elwood, star quarterback of the football team.
The honor roll metalheads sitting near the front of the class started up their usual banter.
“Werewolves suck,” said Richie Bratwurst, the fat smartass.
“Watch out, loser,” said somebody else, as a spitball zipped past Danny’s snout.
Laughter erupted throughout the classroom. Danny pulled his math book from his backpack and opened to a random page. He pretended to study a geometry graph.
Ever since Moose Elwood beat him out for the quarterback job during summer training camp three years ago, picking on Danny had become routine. It was the life of a backup, the life of a loser who bore his cross of failure because others enjoyed watching him suffer.
Mr. Ferrell snubbed a cigarette out on his desk and approached the blackboard. “Quiet up, class. Danny’s a shame to us all, but your final test is next week and we’ve still got to cover the mathematics of the hair metal solo.”
Danny shivered; his fur reddened. Math was his worst subject. He would be lucky to squeeze by with a D this semester. He couldn’t even find the square root of most Black Sabbath songs, something most students had mastered during the first week.
As Mr. Ferrell scribbled musical notes and a stick figure of Satan on the board, Barbetta slipped a note onto Danny’s desk.
His heart raced. Barbetta was the most beautiful girl in school. She had gotten run over by a train on two occasions.
Few metalheads mustered the courage to orchestrate one train accident. Surviving two of them made her a school legend. All Danny ever wanted was to be a legend.
Danny unfolded the note and read You better lose it.
Lose what, he replied.
Barbetta pressed a tissue to her eyes and passed the note back to him. Your virginity.
Everyone in school knew that Danny had never staged a single accident. Why bother, he wrote. I’m waiting for the right time.
You better do it quick. Moose got in an accident this morning. Of course he did. He’s team captain. It’s pre-game ritual.
Moose died this morning.
Danny began to sweat.
Barbetta broke into a crying fit and ran out of the classroom. All of the students faced Danny, glaring at him with their fiercest Danzig grimaces, which they had learned in Facial Education.
Mr. Ferrell broke his chalk and crushed it to dust between the fingers of one of his chain mail gloves. “Danny, this is the third time this week that you’ve upset a member of the fairer gender. Should I duct tape your mouth again, or can I trust that you’ll sit still and fail quietly?”