The Book of Apex: Volume 1 of Apex Magazine (3 page)

Where does
music come from? Nowhere. It’s something out of nothing. All we know about Bob
is he looks old, tired, and like he used to have fun, but that was
twenty-thousand miles and two decades gone.

So we make shit up. We play
like there isn’t property, or crack men, or hard times. Our song says there is
just a nice guy named Bob having a hard time.

Miranda stretches upward like a
cat and dances in front of his axe. She throws her body into her voice. She
sings higher than an angel, lower than Tom Waits.

I play faster, strumming the
strings and pressing the wood. Just for that moment, just for then, I don’t
have to feel scared and rotten. I feel gigantic.

Bob’s song wanes to a trickle
of notes. He tilts from side to side before Miranda and then falls onto the
metal floor. He curls up baby-style.

We jump out of the rig and down
onto a root-buckled street. Zaki One takes Bob’s axe; Zaki Two takes his rope.
The air smells different at this end of town. Not better: less slime mold and
paint fumes, more rotting meat and burning tires.

Miranda turns around in a slow
circle. “That way.” She points. “Due north. That’s where we’ll find the
enclave.”

I want someone to know where
we’re going, so I don’t question her as we start walking.

“It’s the music that keeps us
safe. We should have turned a long time ago,” Miranda says.

“Or because we have each
other,” Zaki One says. “We have love.”

“It’s because we’re still
virgins and the magic unicorn light protects us,” I say.

“I’m not a virgin.” Zaki smiles
at each other.

“It’s because we’re too wimpy
to let go,” I say. I want them to stop talking. It hurts to think about it.

“No. It hurts more to notice,”
Zaki Two says. “We’re brave warriors.”

Miranda nods and starts to say
something else, but I interrupt her. I don’t like thinking about being whole
and trapped in the brokenness. It makes me itchy. “I’m working on a new song,”
I lie. Lying is the best way to start a song.

I make up
something and teach them the chords. I mean to make it light and fun, but by
the time we figure out the chorus, it’s goth times ten.

“These days the grey bleeds
into me like water. These days of praise and promise fall away.”

Miranda walks beside me. I try
not to notice she wears bruises underneath the collar of her shirt like a
necklace. She rubs the bruises as we walk.

Rats run across the road from
one overgrown lawn to another. The grass could be hiding things, I think, a
moment before—

“Lock them in the basement!”

“Kill the music! Kill them!
Hurt!”

Women run at us. They pour out
of the houses. They leap up from the grass, carrying sewing needles and kitchen
knives. They run on skinny legs encased in ragged pantyhose.

“Kill them! Bad!”

“The basement! The basement!”

Each of Zaki throws tin foil
balls up into the air. Wilds love foil. Some women stop and watch the balls
ascend and then fall down. When the balls hit the ground they fight for them.
Some wilds keep coming though.

Miranda starts running. We
follow her.

“Fuck this. Fuck this,” Miranda
says with every stride. I look back and a woman is right behind me. I smell
her—unwashed and musky. Her mouth is open and her face is blank with an
emptiness I could fall into, should fall into. It could be over. What’s wrong
with over?

“Tom!” Miranda yells.

I look forward and see the road
coming to an end. A dead end sign looms to my right, and I laugh because isn’t
that the truth? I jump over the thigh-high metal median and then see Zaki and
Miranda floating out in front of me. They fall into nothing. We’ve run off a
cliff and it takes us a while to land. I like the way down but then—

Crunch.

Ow.

Everything pops with pain.

The women on the cliff top
above us howl. They could climb down, but this looks to be the edge of their
territory.

“Fuck wilds!” I yell up at
them.

“The basement,” one yells. “The
basement!”

I spit blood on the ground and
ask, “Are you guys okay?”

“Fine,” Miranda says.

“Wonderful,” Zaki One says.

“I heard a snap—a bone break.
It wasn’t mine,” I say.

Miranda looks distant.

“Wasn’t me,” the Zakis say.

“A twig?” Miranda says.

“No. Bone.”

“A branch?”

“Don’t be a masochist. We can
go to the library and check out books on bones. I can make you a cast or
something.”

“Tom,” Miranda says.

“What?”

“Pain helps. Let it help,” she
says. “Don’t worry.”

“Fine. Whatever. But if I see
bone I’m going to be pissed.”

“Uh...” Zaki Two grins.

“Oh, ha ha ha,” I say, and then
laugh for real.

Everyone loves a boner joke. At
least we do. It feels good to laugh and not think about pain and breaking
apart. When we start walking, Miranda hunches over and both of Zaki limps.

Before I left home, things got
bad.

My dad would come home from
work with his briefcase full of half-rotten fruit and hunks of raw meat. He’d
yell, “Honey, I’m home.” He’d have a dead snake slung across his back and would
dump everything onto the kitchen table and glare at me. My mom, wearing a
perma-glazed stoner grin, would clap her hands in delight.

My mom threw wet laundry into
my dresser. She let the kettle boil on the stove for so long that it melted.
She went out shopping and wouldn’t come back for days.

My little sister carried a walking
stick everywhere she went. She randomly hit the floor with it. I tried to talk
to her, but she would stare at me with the wizened, desert-strained eyes of a
hermit and growl.

Every night my mom made us sit
around the dinner table, say grace, and eat.

“Our holiest of high up
fathers,” she began, and then squinted and looked confused. “Our thanks to our
joy and shit, it’s all dog shit and starlight, and fuck you...”

On and on. No one else noticed.

Then Dad started yelling,
“Amen, amen, amen,” and then we dished out our raw snake steaks with canned
beans poured on top.

I asked, “Can I be excused?”

“No. Fuck you,” Mom said.

“We’ve been sitting here three
hours.”

“No. Asshole. Shit-spawn.”

The night before I left for
good, I strummed in my room, working on a tune that didn’t yet know what it
wanted to be. My sister came in, hobbling behind her stick.

“Tom,” she said.

I smiled. It had been a while
since she’d known my name.

“Tom, it’s ending, isn’t it?
We’re all going on a long trip, aren’t we?”

I didn’t know what to say.
Every generation thinks it’s going to be the last. Everyone in history is
always waiting for everything to end, but then it never does. Right?

My sister looked like she
wanted to cry, but didn’t remember how. She curled up like a dog at the foot of
my bed and slept. The next day I packed a duffle bag and went to school.

Miranda and Zaki took me to
their apartment. It was easy to make rent. Whenever our landlady showed up, we
just gave her flowers, postage stamps, tin foil balls, or whatever.

“Almost there now,” Miranda
says. She turns and gives me a look. A come-hither look?

Maybe.

I walk closer to her. I could
hold her hand. I could put an arm around her, that wouldn’t be weird, right? Is
that what she wants, or would it ruin everything?

The sound of breaking glass
cuts into the moment—if we were even having one. The band draws closer together
and follows the sound to a row of junked-up cars tilted onto their sides.
People peek out at us in between the hoods and trunks.

“Looks good. Looks paranoid,”
Zaki One says.

“Paranoid’s still afraid.
Paranoid’s good,” Miranda whispers.

“Paranoid is awesome. What
could be bad about paranoia?” I say. “Can we come in?” I yell. “We’re kids from
the south side.”

They poke rifles toward us.
Zaki Two takes a step forward, a sick grin on his face, like let’s get this
over with.

“We’ll play for you.” Zaki One
holds up a flute. He runs up to stand beside his brother.

“We’re the Three Ring Dragon,”
Miranda adds.

They
grunt, lower the guns, and push aside a Geo Metro to let us in.

“Welcome,” a girl says. She
smiles and for a second there’s someone home, but then she blinks and goes away
inside of herself.

We walk up a little hill and
the first thing I notice is kids milling about in a grassy field. They look
skinny and tired. Beyond the grass sits a sprawling old hospital next to a
smokestack with something silvery balanced on top of it.

When the kids see us, they get
up and shamble toward us. The band holds hands. Zaki Two has something sharp
embedded in his hand. I look down and see a piece of wire jammed into the flesh
between his thumb and pointer finger. I have two thoughts: that’s disgusting,
and that’s a really good idea.

The kids come closer. Hundreds
of them. They smell nasty and look broken—but who doesn’t look bad these days?
They seem excited, almost agitated, to see us.

“They’re a band,” one kid says.

“All our batteries are dead,”
another adds.

“Everything downloaded is gone.
We miss it,” a boy says.

The kids nod and all lose
interest in us.

“We miss a lot of things too,”
Miranda says. “It’s been hard, but we’ll be okay now?”

“We’re keeping safe,” a girl
mutters. “Safe as a time bomb. What?”

A boy scratches at an infected
cow brand burned into his forearm. The pain wakes him up a little. “Will you
play? We need you to play.”

“We’ll play.”

Pain helps. Music helps. Coffee
helps. Whole wheat bread, the sound of bells, and cranberry juice helps. So do
dogs and cats.

Beer doesn’t. TV doesn’t.
Magazines and most books don’t. Talking helps, but it’s getting hard to talk
and not scream.

Someone graffitied pictures of
wolves along the concrete walls of the hospital. Graffiti helps, especially if
it takes a while to figure out the lettering.

“Maybe the wolves are the
problem,” I say. A couple years back they’d bitten a lot of people.

“Nah, they’re extinct,” Zaki
One says.

“Like us,” Miranda whispers.
She presses her hand against her collarbone and winces.

“What’s that silver thing up on
the smokestack?” I ask to change the subject.

We walk to it and see a big
metal dog cage lying perched on top of it. A girl in pink and white sits up
there. I can just make out her pout from the ground.

Someone has done a half-ass job
of mortaring spiraled stairs up the smokestack. I climb them with Miranda. Zaki
stands watch below with folded arms. The stairs hold and we make it all the way
up.

The caged girl is pretty in a
high-school popular kind of way. “I know you,” I say. “How do I know you?”

Miranda hums a melody, and the
girl sits up and smiles. Her cage creaks and shifts. The bottom of her dress is
soot stained from the tendrils of smoke that rise from the smoldering
biohazards beneath.

“You know my song.” She turns
her head from side to side, and it is like looking at an advertisement for
something I don’t want to buy.

Miranda sings, “Baby I long for
you. I want you. Ooh. Aah.”

The girl echoes the words.
Where Miranda’s voice hits every note with an easy precision, the girl’s
throaty voice grinds sex into everything.

I know who she is: the tweeny
crooner, perfume huckster, pop princess of an empire long gone.

Let her rot, I think as she
rises to her knees. The dog kennel is too low to let her stand. I see that
she’s had to stay very still to keep it from tottering off the smoke stack.

“They’ve stopped feeding me.
They’ve forgotten about me, even though they launched this huge fucked-up
mission to rescue me,” she says. “They got jobs at the hotel I was staying in,
and after my show they smuggled me out in the service elevator with all this
talk about seizing the means of entertainment production and liberating the
iconic goddess. It was cool for a while. They liked to listen to me sing, but
then they stuck me up here and forgot.” She coughs and spits blackened phlegm
down into the hole of the smokestack below.

“You sound... normal,” I say.

The princess nods. “I’m immune
or something. I’ve been writing my own songs up here. I never got to do that
before. You have to get me out.”