And then scant inches from Shelly’s shroud…I collapsed.
Revolted, sickened, just beside myself, all the energy ran out of me. I slid down that heap of corpses, face netted with buzzing flies, rank meat packed beneath my fingernails.
“You ready to come down now, son?” one of the men asked.
I slid out of the back and they knocked me to the pavement, kicking the shit out of me until I lost consciousness. When I woke, a few hours later, I was lying in the grass where they’d thrown me. A dog was licking the filth from my fingers. My breath was fuming out in cold white clouds, the face of the moon above stained with a black trail of smoke from the ever-blazing body pits.
This is what it had come to.
God bless America.
5
All I wanted after that was to be alone, to brood and break down in private with a bottle of whiskey in one hand, but Bill Hermes found me and wouldn’t let that happen.
“She’s dead now,” he said. “Shelly’s gone and she’s at peace. Don’t profane her memory by destroying yourself.”
Sage advice. I knew it made perfect sense just as I knew I would not follow it. All I wanted now was destruction, cool white oblivion. Maybe Bill sensed that too, because he boiled water on his woodstove and drew a bath and made me clean up. And when that was done, he made me some food. It was canned like everything else these days, but at least it was something to put in my stomach.
As I ate, picking at corned beef hash and powdered eggs, he watched me. Watched me very closely. He pulled a Winston out of a crumpled red pack, snapped off the filter and lit up, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. And never once did he take his eyes off of me.
“Well, go ahead, Bill,” I said. “You got something to say, so say it.”
He chuckled. “I’m thinking it’s time you pack up your old kit bag and move on. Nothing here for you now. City’s getting worse by the day. Get out. Get out into the country where a man has a chance.”
“We lived here. This was our neighborhood.”
“That’s all past now, son. Nothing but memories. Get out for chrissake. Get out now.”
“You coming?”
“For what? Ain’t nothing out there for me. I’m too damn old to start again.”
I set my fork down. “Nothing here but memories for you, too, Bill.”
“When you get my age,” he said, blowing out a cloud of smoke, “there ain’t much else.”
He turned away and looked out the curtains to the streets below. Just shook his head. “Goddamn cesspool, Rick. That’s what. Been wanting to get out for a long time. Would’ve, too, if Ellen hadn’t loved it here so much. She grew up two streets away. Even after she passed…I don’t know…something held me.”
“Something’s holding me, too.”
“Bullshit.” Bill coughed into his hand and for maybe the first time, I noticed how blotchy his face looked. A funny yellow sheen to it. “Bullshit, I say. You need to go before it gets worse. Right goddamn now, Rick. I’m too old to go with you. You pull an old tree up by the roots, its dies. But a young one…you can replant it and it’ll bear leaf. You following me?”
I was. “I’ll think it over.”
Bill looked like he was about to read me the riot act, but then the wind went out of him and he broke into a coughing fit. The cigarette fell from his fingers and he held himself up by the countertop.
I was on my feet. “Bill…”
He waved me away. “I’m all right. Just old. Just smoking too much for too long. That’s all.”
But I wasn’t believing that. The coughing. The weakness. The blotchy face. No, this was something else entirely. And he had it good.
“Rick, get the hell out,” he said, pulling himself up, standing erect with great exertion that left him gasping. “Ellen and I…oh, Jesus in heaven…we loved you and Shelly to death. Never had kids of our own. Always thought if we did, they might be like you two. So do an old man a favor and get out of the city.”
“Bill, I…”
“Please, Rick.”
There was no doubt about it at all then: Bill Hermes had radiation sickness.
A week later he was dead.
6
Bill Hermes was a good man. A wise man seasoned by time and experience. Did I listen to his advice? Of course not. I stayed. God help me, but I did.
Food and water were the biggest problems. For so long I had been mainly concerned with nursing Shelly back to health and in doing so, I had let everything else go to shit. Mother Hubbard’s cupboard was bare as Miss July’s thigh so I took to the streets with the rest of the gutter rats, scavenging anything I could find.
When Shelly’s deterioration began, the city had been running a series of aid stations with fresh water, food, and medical supplies. But in the many weeks since these had all been closed up and boarded down. Other than the Army out patrolling there was little order, state and local government having collapsed on just about every conceivable level.
So gun in hand, I hunted.
And was hunted.
I had a 9mm Browning Hi-Power I’d taken from Bill Hermes’ apartment. I’d never killed a man in my life and never truly wanted to, but I knew the time was coming. I’d jacked a few rounds over the heads of some bad boys that had been coming after me, but never anything more.
Then, about three or four days after Bill died, some old guy came up to me in the street, wanted a cigarette. Poor bastard was shot through with acute radiation sickness: teeth all gone, hair fallen out, face covered with ulcers.
But I wasn’t taking any chances.
I put the gun on him, told him to stay back. With so many dying of infectious disease in the city, I had a real horror of all the nasty germs floating around out there and what they could do. The radiation did something to those germs, made bigger, badder, more virulent bugs out of them. Some were the same old bugs, but others were much deadlier than they once were. And I’d already been exposed to cholera by then and God knew what else. My number was going to come up sooner or later.
The old man attempted a smile. “Just want one of them cigarettes. That’s all.” He broke up into a coughing fit, spewing blood and bile to the sidewalk. “Gimme one, friend. Gimme one and I’ll tell you where there’s food. I ain’t got but a day or two left. It won’t do me no good.”
I threw him a pack and a book of matches. “Keep ‘em. I got more.”
He was nearly orgasmic as he smoked that cigarette. Such is the nature of addiction. Something I knew well. I had quit smoking three years before…but after the bombs came down, what with the stress I started again. After he got a few drags down, he told me where there was a deli. Canned food that had barely been touched. I was welcome to it.
I scouted down a few streets, found the back door to the deli like the old guy said. And like he said, the deli had a storeroom with boxes and boxes of canned and dried goods. Like a kid in a candy store, I filled my sack with canned pasta, vegetables, tinned milk, mac and cheese. I was pretty happy about it all. I was doing real good. Too good, I soon learned.
When I tried to leave, a woman came stumbling out of the front of the store. She was wearing an old fur coat with nothing on beneath. Her flesh was pitted with spreading sores and flaking scabs. There was some crusty fungal growth coming out of her nose and she was entirely bald. She looked at me with glassy, fixed eyes and grinned with a mouth of graying, broken teeth.
“Mine,” she said, holding out her filthy hands. “It’s all mine!”
I put the Browning on her. “Get the fuck away from me.”
“Mine!” she said, yellow foam running down her chin like she was rabid. “Give it to me, pretty boy! It’s all mine!”