Read Ice Cream and Venom Online
Authors: Kevin Long
On Sunday, they entered Earth orbit and the announcement was made. On Monday, the Astronauts were loaded into the landing-craft.
"What happens now?" Gene said.
"You go home, we go away, and our paths do not crrross again," Goldie said.
"Will there be other spacefaring species that contact us?"
"Unlikely. Therrre are not many otherrr species that do not rrrely on us for trrravel and trrrade and even those who do will be appalled by yourrr perrrversion against evolution itself."
"So we're quarantined?"
"As I underrrstand the word, yes."
"It's a pity. I would have liked to live for another century or so."
"Your people do not rrrespect life. We cannot give you more of it. We cannot assist you in sprrreading your sickness into trrrackless space."
"I totally understand," Gene said, "For what it's worth, I think you're making the right decision."
"If morrre of your people werrre like you, Gene, your species would have no need of gods. You would be gods yourrrselves."
Gene just blushed at that, said he didn't think so and went on into the lander. Thirty minutes later, he and Jim stepped out of the ship in the UN Plaza in New York City. An hour later, the alien starship was pulling off into interplanetary space at more than 30 Gs acceleration, never to return. Eventually there was a bright flash that an angry news media insisted was the ship blowing up, but which was actually when it folded space to travel between stars.
And so it came to be that humanity remained locked up on one little planet in one dinky little corner of the galaxy forever, having pissed away its better tomorrow—along with its dreams of interstellar empires and glory and conquest doomed never to be realized. The species as a whole became nothing more than an embarrassing footnote in galactic history.
But the dogs, the dogs went on halfway to forever. And as for Joe Beauchamp—he went with them.
It didn't matter where he came from, or where he was going, since he never got there. It didn't even matter who he was because of course he wasn't really the person he thought he was. All that mattered was that at that moment, in that tiny slice of time, that moving instant, he was a warm body on an airliner, just like seventy or so other warm bodies, on a crappy, uncomfortable redeye flight from somewhere to elsewhere. It was a rough, buffeting flight, hours of air pockets and fasten-seatbelts signs and spilled coffee. It had gotten worse. The smell of spilled coffee gave way to the smell of spilled vodka in tiny plastic bottles, and then the smell of vomit and urine and the intangible aura of fear. His wife, in the window seat, held his hand, white knuckled and on the edge of panic.
There was nothing outside the windows, nothing recognizable, just darkness and clouds.
After what seemed like hours—and really was—the pilot came on and said their destination was shut down for inclement weather, and rather than ride this paint-shaker any longer than they had to for no damn reason whatsoever, they'd be making an emergency landing and layover at the nearest available location.
So they did.
They landed at a nondescript airport in the early golden light of dawn.
Where the hell were they?
"At the closest airport."
Closest to what?
No one knew. Or maybe they did—who can tell?—But the crew was oddly tense. They taxied up to a terminal. There was a low cloud cover cutting out most of the sunlight, though slanted rays from the sunrise were coming in over the dank horizon. Mercury vapor lamps on the ground were casting their sickly hue over the ground, reflecting off it, and coloring the clouds themselves. Nothing moved, except their plane.
Closer to the terminal, things looked odd. There were several planes docked to the buildings by those enclosed gangways, but something subliminal about them was wrong. He couldn't think of what it was, but they gave an impression of permanence that one doesn't usually get out of commercial aviation. He didn't know why. A flight attendant came by before he really had a chance to dwell on his misgivings, and asked him to gather up his things and disembark. He thanked her, and didn't notice that she wouldn't meet his eyes. She handed him a paper voucher that she said was good for a night in the hotel, free meals, and a flight to his destination. Before he even had a chance to stand, she'd moved on to the next person.
"No sir, I'm not sure where we are," she was saying to the man in the seat behind his, "but if you'll take this voucher..."
His wife knocked back the last dregs of her tiny vodka bottle while he awkwardly encumbered himself with his carry-on crap, and they moved to the exit. He again failed to notice that the crew wouldn't meet his eyes when he disembarked. The cockpit door was open, but he also failed to notice the white face on the pilot, or the borderline-hysterical expression on the face of the flight engineer. The co-pilot was actually restrained and sedated in one of the bathrooms.
His wife and he didn't notice or wonder this when they got off the plane, as just part of a semi-organized queue of fellow travelers. Overjoyed to be on the ground and safe again, they held hands. They made their way down the elevated, enclosed gangway, which twisted and turned before it entered the terminal, and it was only there, after he'd passed the final threshold, that he knew something was terribly, terribly wrong.
It was, in its prime, a nice 1970s kind of airport, all pre-stressed concrete and ceiling-to-floor windows, brown not-quite-wood trim on the walls, and a low earth tone carpet, but it was not in its prime. It was filthy, the bench-chairs were broken, the ceiling tiles were yellow with a lifetime of cigarette smoke, there was the smell of human feces in the air, and worse smells besides. There were no lights on, no light at all save the dim, sickly purgatorial one that filtered through the windows.
"What the hell?" he thought, "This can't be right." The other ex-passengers showed the same kind of shock and confusion. Some of them started casting about for a ticket agent or airline representative to complain to.
"We must have come to the wrong terminal," she said to him, "this must be under construction or something, there's no one here."
"Scheduled for demolition, more likely," He said. She chuckled at that, despite being frazzled from the flight and bewildered by their surroundings, and he remembered for the zillionth time why he loved her.
"Tell you what," he said, "I'm going to walk back to the plane and talk to the crew, maybe they can... I dunno... take us to the right terminal, or call for someone to take us to wherever we're supposed to be." He set down his large duffel bag.
"Don't do that!" she said, "It's filthy in here!" She picked up the bag, which reluctantly came away from the floor with a sucking sound and a thin coating of sticky clear goo.
"Sorry," he quickly cringed. She glared at him.
"Anyway, maybe you look around for anyone official in here while I do that, don't go too far, though, it'll only be a minute."
"Ok," she said, looking mournfully at the ruined bottom of the bag.
"I love you," he said as he went back into the boarding gangway.
"Uh-huh, me too," she said, absently.
Back at the plane, the flight attendant met him.
"I'm sorry, sir, you can't go back on the aircraft."
"I don't want to, I just wanted to tell you something... uhm... odd," he said. "Can I speak to the pilot?"
"Is there a problem?" asked the flight attendant, who knew damn well that there was. She was on the edge of panic, and would eventually commit suicide as a result of her complicity in all this, but of course he couldn't know that. She struggled to remain calm.
"Problem?" he said, absently.
"Yes sir," she said with fake cheerfulness, "just follow this hallway to the terminal, and everything will be fine."
"Terminal—you know, it's the damndest thing, I was... I was just gonna tell you something, but I forgot what it is," he said.
"Must not have been very important then," she said.
"Oh, now I remember: I'm radioactive."
"What," the attendant said, startled.
"It's an old Steve Martin joke," he said, then stared at her blankly for a bit. She stared blankly at him for a bit, until she realized it was safe.
"Thank you for flying Periculum Air," she said, "We know you have choices in air traffic, and we thank you for making us your first one. We hope you had a pleasant flight, and invite you to fly us again in the future."
"Oh, yes, very pleasant," he said, "I must have fallen asleep."
The attendant motioned him down the hall, and he went back through in to the devastated terminal. He saw a woman sitting there in a half-destroyed bank of bolted-together chairs, staring intently at the bottom of a duffel bag for some reason. He didn't recognize her, but he thought she was pretty, so he went over and said "Hi."
"Hi," she returned, "Who are you?"
He thought about that for a bit, before answering, "You know, it's the damndest thing, but I have no idea."
They heard some noises behind them. The plane pulled away from the terminal, the enclosed gangway folded back against the building.
"Huh," she said.
"I feel... I feel like watching that plane leave should mean something to me, but I can't think what," he said.
"Huh," she said. He turned to look at her. The terminal was mostly devoid of people, a few passengers were wandering around aimlessly, and some ratty-looking toughs were kicking the crap out of someone curled up on the ground. Neither he nor she thought to do anything about that.
"This is going to sound stupid, but I think... I can't seem to remember who I am or what I'm doing here. I can't even seem to remember my name."
"Are you feeling all right?" she asked.
"Yeah, I feel fine, just... uhm... blank."
"Check your wallet," his forgotten wife told him. He did. He read his name off the driver's license out loud, but then one of the toughs noticed him, and ran by, snatching it out of his hand and pushing him over in the process, then tore off down another hallway.
"Are you ok?" she said as she helped him up.
"Yeah. Damn! He couldn't have waited ten seconds to rob me? I didn't even get a chance to read my own ID"
"Maybe you've had a stroke?" she said, "I've heard that stroke victims can have memory loss."
"Oh, God, you're right!" he said. The blood left his face in panic, and his knees went weak. He sat down on the sticky, disgusting ground.
"We should find you a doctor," she said, "They must have one around here somewhere." She helped him up again. They walked toward what looked like the main concourse out of the terminal.
"Thank you," he said, meekly, "What's your name?"
"It's..." she trailed off, presently came to a halt, "Huh." she said. "Where are we going?"
"Uhm..." his stomach growled, "Food, I think. We were going to go get something to eat."
"Together?"
"Evidently."
"I don't know how I feel about that, going off with a strange man. I don't even know your name."
"You're married," he said, noticing the ring he'd bought for her but couldn't remember or recognize.
"Yes?" she said looking at the same ring as though it was for the first time.
"We could have one of those strangers-who-go-bump-in-the-night kind of trysts," he said, giving her a rakish smile.
"No, that doesn't seem right," she said, "I'm flattered, of course, but, no. I love my husband" she said with the robotic reflex of an attractive married woman who gets hit on a lot.
"Well, nice meeting you," he said.
"Likewise," she said, and then she said his name, dredged out of some rapidly eroding associative memory. He didn't recognize it, of course, and didn't remember it a moment later.
Neither did she.
He turned and went down the hall, she stayed in the terminal. They never saw, nor remembered each other ever again.
The concourse from that terminal to the main section of the airport was wide, dark, and a thousand years long. He would later have no memory of how lengthy was the travail it took him to get through it—fifteen minutes at a brisk pace? A day? A month? A lifetime?—Nor, indeed, would he have any memory of ever having been in it at all. In this new world without memory, every time was a first time for everything, no matter how rote it had been. How many times did he stop, forgetting his purpose in the hallway, and just stand around until some new, conflicting thought formed in his head? How many nights did he sleep in the filth against the wall? Where did his food come from? How many times was he beaten and raped by the people he met on the way? He would not and could not have any recollection of any of this, and in that one regard, his captivity was oddly kind.
All that could be said for sure—though not by him of course—was that at some point after that he awoke after a violent three-day illness that he had no memory of. He had been thirsty and drank some standing water he found in an old storage room that had filled up several feet deep with runoff from an ancient fire sprinkler system. He had drunk his fill, but unbeknownst to him, the place had originally been a storage space for dead car batteries from the airport's fleet of golf carts. These had grown grody and corroded during their long submersion, resulting in him poisoning himself. This had happened to him three times so far, but of course he had no memory of it.
He awoke thirsty and famished in a bathroom stall, with very little strength, and encased in a living crust of cockroaches. As he started to move about, they scrambled off of him, but he grabbed several and munched on them vacantly. Several more he pinched the heads off of, and stuck them in his pocket for later. To his surprise he found a small, dead rat in there. A bonus!
Scratched in the wall of the stall was a line from a song. He read it. He didn't remember it, but reading it last night was the thing that made him choose this stall to sleep in.
"We are living in an age
When sex and horror
Are our new gods"
He could still read. Curiously some of the people lost this ability when they came to this place, others didn't. Neither he nor the instigators of this awful life knew why that was. There was lots of graffiti around, most of it nonsensical, most of it quite old, the overwhelming majority comically half-finished when the vandal forgot what he or she was writing in mid-sentence, and trailed off.
He didn't know why, but the words made him feel calm and safe, as though, "as though, as though there's something I've forgotten here, but I can't quite recognize it." Ignoring his hunger—the ones who survived learned to ignore their hunger for long periods of time—he picked up a broken metal door stopper out of his other pocket, and scratched the phrase "I do not like this age" in the rusted stall side next to the Frankie Goes To Hollywood lyrics, then put the stopper back in his grimy pocket and looked at his work.
"I have done something," he thought, but while reading the wall he forgot entirely what it was, noticed he was hungry, and went out looking for food. He shuffled his way out to the main hallway, and then followed the light to the main concourse.
It was a massive atrium five stories tall, with blackened skylights letting in a sulfuric light, terraces of stained, pre-stressed concrete connected by banks of long-dead escalators. There were lots of people—perhaps hundreds—in there. On the big atrium walls there were a few examples of large framed artwork left, generally high enough and far enough from outcroppings to prevent them from being torn down. They were all vague abstracts, whether by intention or simply the passage of time. Whatever they had been intended to be—a cubistic representation of the glories of flight, or a mural of a cow—they'd ended up abstracts now. The walls were stained with blood, grime, soot, dust, dirt, every bit as bad as the floors in the terminal had been. Small objects thrown against them would stick. Larger objects thrown against them would gradually pull away with an intestinal "schlopping" kind of nose before they fell to the floor. The ground floor was covered yards-deep in human feces, refuse, and dead bodies. It had been so long that this was gradually turning to compost and soil, after a fashion. It was covered with a small forest of mushrooms and chives. There was a perpetual cloud of cooking fire smoke at the top of the atrium. What they were cooking is best unasked.
How long had he been there? A moment just coming out of the concourse, or had he been living there for years? For him there was no substantial difference, everything was in the now.
In the now, with no memory of how he got there, he stood looking around in the purgatorial half-light that could have been a cloudy day or a bright cloudless night. He saw the abstracts, and for the hundredth time he couldn't make sense of them.
A live body fell past his balcony on the second floor of the atrium, and hit the fungus and feces and chives with a loud slapping, splattering sound. He hadn't seen where the body came from—if he fell from the third or fourth floors, he had a fair chance to survive, since there was a good six feet of squishy filth to cushion the blow. He, himself, had once been thrown off the fourth floor after losing a rumble, and survived, though it took him two days to dig his way out of the suffocating filth. Again, fortunately, he didn't remember it.
There was a general migration from day to day from the bottom of the atrium to the top. People began down below in the filth, and wandered upstairs gradually, rediscovering themselves time and time again in some new-to-them surrounding with no memory of getting there, no sense of who they were, and they attempted to survive by instinct. The top two floors were the most crowded and violent, the place where everyone wanted to be, though no one knew why. From thence, people went back down again, one way or another: Perhaps forced out by stronger people working their ways up from the lower floors, perhaps thrown over the side. Even in this there were a couple ways one could go: either as a person, or as the digested remains of a person shat over a high banister in to the emptiness below. What goes up must come down, he had thought several times/for the first time, and chucked to himself, then forgot his own cleverness before he'd even finished laughing.
A gaggle of people came by, several of them carrying food. He wanted food. He jumped into the small throng and attacked one of the people carrying a mercifully unidentifiable shank of meat. The others piled on him and started beating on him, and he clawed back at them. At first focused, the fight went much longer than it should have since everyone involved was on the edge of starvation. As the fight progressed, their focus was lost, and the sides of the competitors began to drift, but the fight itself remained.
They must have been fighting for a reason, right? So keep on going!
By the end, he was part of the small throng, and the rest of its members had attacked and killed two of the food-carriers, assuming them to be thieves. The third, with two broken legs, was chucked over the railing in to the muck below. They feasted on the meat—if that's what it was—and he discovered a dead rat in his other pocket, which he shared with a pretty-but-malnourished lady, which resulted in the two of them excusing themselves from the throng to go into a concourse and have sex in the shadows. This they then did, but half way through she suddenly found herself in delicto flagrante with a total stranger, and no memory of how she got there, and ran off screaming 'rape.' This attracted the attention of several other people lurking in the shadows who then beat the hell out of him and raped him themselves, then they all went off looking for food. By the time the rape-gang got back to/discovered the main atrium, he was their leader, though no one was quite sure how this had happened, not that it really mattered. They heard noise on the floor above them and decided to go up and check it out.
This resulted in a rumble with another gaggle of people, which degenerated in to a bloodbath, and he ran away, down the broken, frightening escalators that slipped back and forth under his feet, and just ahead of an angry mob who pretty clearly wanted to eat him. They would have, too, but the combined weight of the gang was several thousand pounds, far more than the stripped old gears and belts of the dead escalators could handle, and the steps ripped free, just as he got off at the landing. The group behind him ended up sliding fifteen feet or so to the ground, and ending up in a bloody heap, ass-over-teakettle, with no idea how they got there. They quickly began fighting amongst each other.
A glob of human excrement, which had previously itself been a human, fell on him. He scraped off as much of the filth as he could, then ducked in to a bathroom that was occupied by several women who were startled to see him. Before they had the chance to attack, he stabbed one of them in the abdomen with his metal doorstopper, and pulled it swiftly up gutting her like a trout. Huge gouts of blood sprayed out, adding another layer of stains to the already-mephitic walls, and to his already-filthy skin and tattered clothing. The others ran off in fear. Overcome by adrenaline, he punched one of the old stalls doors, long since off its hinges, and leaning against the cracked, tiled wall. He punched it again and again until his knuckles were sore and bloody, and covered in mildew from the door itself. Then he calmed down, and wondered how he came to be in this place. He was tired, and decided to go look for a safe spot for the night, but on his way out he found one of the stalls still had a working door.
Was it safe? Not really. A good swift kick could easily break it in, but just as he was about to leave for a more secure spot, he noticed writing on the wall. Someone had scratched
We are living in an age
When sex and horror
Are our new gods
I do not like this age
It was all in the same handwriting. For some reason he couldn't understand, this made him feel secure and even happy, so he settled in and went to sleep.