Ever since she was little, Annie gave fake names to people she didn’t know personally. It was a tactic that a psychiatrist once told her is very common in young children to easily associate people and to recognize them by definitive physical attributes. It was also a way to find quick comfort around total strangers, if one was inclined towards shyness, as Annie once was. She knew none of these men, but she had no interest in growing comfortable with them. They’d stormed the Purple Cat and attacked them, completely unprovoked. Still, she gave them names because it was the only thing that seemed normal to her.
The Shiny Bald One. The Midget Man. The Yeti. She hadn’t named the fourth one yet.
This, thought Annie, is what happens when the world ends. People like this come out of the woodwork, ready for such terrible deeds, ready and waiting since the day, they were born. The rules go out the window and the craving for blood increases. Men (including women) would quickly revert back to an animal state when backed into a corner. They probably weren’t evil people before the storm started, though it felt silly to give them the benefit of that doubt. Maybe they were just okay people, with tendencies towards bad deeds on rare occasions, only when opportunity presented itself.
Now they were beasts, still able to walk around on two legs, living in a world full of opportunity and dread and meat and the weakest animals imaginable.
“Please don’t hurt him,” Annie begged, just as The Midget Man tightened his grip on her elbow again. She could feel something prodding against the lower side of her buttocks. The Midget Man’s penis was stiffening, probably turned on by her half naked state, or perhaps even turned on by the spontaneous violence they were asserting against their captives. Men got off on all kinds of different things and The Midget Man seemed a bit more subhuman than most. Though it had nothing to do with his size.
“I advise you to shut your mouth,” said The Midget Man. His nasal passage was congested, judging by the sound of his voice.
They went at Tony hard, swinging, batting, and kicking him into submission.
He hadn’t stood a chance, just based on numbers alone.
Tony’s face looked like it might pop at any moment. Though the room was murky with darkness, save for the fire light, she could see that his face was mashed and covered with splotches of shiny blood. His nose was already crooked to the left, tilted on one side as if he’d fallen flat on his face from a three story building. The Shiny Bald One eased off his barrage for a moment, leaning back. His glistening head caught the glint of the fire, and for a moment, it almost looked like his shiny scalp was covered in roaring flames; an optical illusion mixed with Annie’s own wishful thinking. He shifted aside, allowing an opportunity for The Yeti to drop his boot on to Tony’s throat. The strangling noise that came from her traveling companion (and nearly her savior, once upon a time) was ghastly and unwelcome in her ears.
If The Yeti hadn’t crushed Tony’s windpipe with his boot, then the next dropkick would most definitely achieve that end. Though Annie didn’t believe in God, not since she was a child, she couldn’t help but say a silent prayer for the mangled mess on the floor, squirming with hope of a mercy that would not come—not from above, and not from below.
The Yeti brought his massive boot down on Tony’s throat again, this time with a slow, methodic crunch that seemed to last an eternity. The giant of a man wrung his meaty paws together, delighted by his destruction. His bearded face looked like that of one of those dog-faced boys that Annie remembered seeing in old carnie photos from the twenties and thirties. His eyes were sunken deep into his skull, the only sign of humanity that existed on his furry face. The hair all over his head, cheeks, chin, and jaw was curled in little ringlets. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like his overgrown beard was peppered with gray hair.
“Tony?” Annie asked, holding back on a whimpering sound that hung at the back of her throat. It would not escape, but she wasn’t sure she wanted it to. “Tony—are you okay?”
It was a moronic question, really. If he wasn’t already dead, he would be so soon enough.
The Yeti looked over at Annie, grinning as he pressed his boot into Tony’s throat a third time. A raspy, rattling breath choked inside of Tony’s throat. He was still breathing and Annie considered that a miracle, though she wondered how long the misery would last.
“Your boyfriend won’t be okay, prissy pants. He won’t be okay ever again. And I’ll make sure of that,” said The Yeti. His voice was high-pitched. The typical big-man-little-voice syndrome, Annie thought to herself, trying not to laugh as the man that would be her lover grappled at his decimated windpipe, struggling for a wheezy bit of air.
The man kneeling at Tony’s feet cackled and hooted at The Yeti’s devious comment. In that moment, though she should have been thinking about escape, Annie labeled him as The Chuckle Machine.
“I promise we’ll leave this place and never say a word about this,” she begged.
“I said shut your mouth, bitch,” The Midget Man whispered, right in her ear. She could smell that he was wearing a pungent aftershave, something cheap and offensive. It seemed odd to be so focused on hygiene at a time like this. Tony hadn’t even shaved in the three weeks since the storm started, let alone applying after-shave. The Midget Man surely had a screw loose, or he didn’t quite understand the gravity of the storm outside. “Your boy toy don’t sound so good,” he added, giggling at the terrible sound coming from Tony’s mouth. It was the most painful sound Annie could ever remember hearing.
Outside The Purple Cat, the wind whipped hard now, howling against the roof and the eaves. It was well after midnight now, and Annie suspected that it would be a long time until sunrise, if she even survived that long. Stop thinking like that, she kept telling herself, but it didn’t do much good.
“Ease back a bit,” advised The Shiny Bald One, looking up at The Yeti with dead-serious eyes, that wolfish expression returning in spades. Shiny’s whole facial expression was something stony and unflinching, as if he was unable to emotionally respond to anything in one way or another. He might have been a cowboy in an old spaghetti western—all business, very little talk, ready to brandish his six-shooter when the shit hit the fan. Annie was confident that he was the de facto leader, and so she pleaded with him directly. In movies, you always begged the leader for mercy.
“I know it wasn’t right, coming in here without asking. We were going to die out there.”
“You bet your ass it wasn’t right. Shit’s changed, in case you haven’t noticed,” said The Shiny Bald One, who now stood up from Tony’s crumpled body. She could see Tony’s left hand fingers spasming now, as if they were trying to resuscitate his entire being. Annie heard another rattled breath come from Tony’s mouth.
Still alive. Barely alive, but still alive all the same.
“We staked a claim here about a week ago. You’re not the first bozo to come through, and you won’t be the last. Shit hits the fan and everybody goes flocking to the food. We figured that out ourselves, but we figured it out first, you see? That’s the difference between men like us and spoiled brats like you and Handsome Dan over here. We’re smarter than you, and that’s why we survive.”
“Help us survive, too. I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”
The Chuckle Machine erupted again, still not saying anything but letting his pleasure loose into the air. His hair flew about his head wildly, thin black strands that looked like they’d been dipped in grease. He reminded her of a drug-addled gangster from a classic Hollywood movie, as there was something fully off kilter about him. A real cuckoo bird, somebody like Humphrey Bogart or Greta Garbo might have called him.