Authors: Alex Adams
“It’s a new world. I’m not the man I was. If the tests are to be believed, then I’m not a man at all anymore. I’m some kind of animal. New species, new rules.”
Then he turns the gun to his chest and fires.
Blood mist on the pristine wall. Pope slumps to the ground, a sack of potatoes in an ill-fitting suit. He grins up at me as his body leaks.
“Do something for me.” Blood bubbles.
I don’t look at Jesse. “No.”
He laughs, gags. “I had your sister killed. What do you think about that?”
“Why?”
“She was supposed to be you.”
My body heat circles the drain; I don’t need a mirror to see that I’m as white as these walls. Pope is the thief of hope.
“Why me?”
“Villain’s choice, you might say.”
“Just die, you miserable shit.”
With his last breath, he whispers his want. Then the great George
P. Pope dies with the image of a horrified me burned into his retina—a portent of his journey.
DATE: NOW
“Coward,” the Swiss spits. “For
a man to take his own life tells me he knew he had no value.” Something slides off his native tongue.
“Who gives a shit?” Imminent death has loosened my lips at both edges. Nobody’s going to slap my hand for cursing.
My mother’s dead. …
“Why do you even care about George Pope?”
He rants on. Not English. Not even English enough for me to pick out words. Somewhere along the way, while I’m busy not listening, he switches back to English.
“His wife. I knew her. A foolish, foolish whore.”
“She’s a whore, I’m a whore, your mother’s a whore. We’re all whores.” I am going to die and I don’t care. I just want him to shut up. “You knew I worked for Pope Pharmaceuticals. Is that why you helped me save Lisa?”
“I had to see, America.”
“See what?”
“I had to know how a nobody, a janitor, is the only Pope Pharmaceuticals survivor. When all others died, why did you live? You are nothing special.”
My fingers feel around for the blade in my pocket. I hold it there like a blood-slickened talisman.
“You are not stupid. I thought you would be, you know. A janitor. A stupid janitor. Someone who cleans rat piss from the floors.”
There’s no pain now. Just warmth enveloping me in its fluffy pink blanket. I want to snuggle down and lose myself in its hold. Soon.
“You’re the stupid one, assuming people are only one thing. We’re an amalgamation of things we’ve collected along the way. I was never just a janitor.”
“What else were you? A whore?”
“A daughter, a sister, a wife, a lover, a friend.” I thought I was going to be a mother, but I’m not going to make it. I’m sorry, baby.
I’m unable to sustain life. Your incubator is broken
. “A killer.”
“You? I do not think so.”
Am I still bleeding? It’s too wet to tell. “You don’t know anything, you overgrown piece of cheese.”
“I know everything. Things a creature like yourself could never imagine.”
I laugh, because that’s all I’ve got left. This is how I’m going to go, not kicking and screaming like some dying animal, but laughing. I’ll die with a side stitch and tears streaming because the Swiss actually believes he knows it all.
“What is so funny?” he says.
“Because.”
“You make no sense, America.”
“George P. Pope was a coward. He couldn’t stand to live another minute with his disease. He couldn’t stand what it was doing to him—what it might do to him if he kept on sucking oxygen.”
“I do not see the humor in this.”
Saliva bubbles between my lips. “You wouldn’t. You weren’t there. It’s so funny. It’s so damn funny.”
“Tell me.”
I’ve never giggled, but now, at the end, I do. The Swiss shifts on his haunches; attack is imminent. His breath comes closer. I feel him. My bloody hand reaches out and touches the end of my world.
DATE: THEN
There is only one way
to do what I do next: remove my emotions, place them in my pocket, keep them safe from the rest of me.
I look up at Jesse.
I’m sorry
, I want to say.
I thought I was doing the right thing by talking to you
. But I’m not sure if that’s true or if it’s just another story I’m telling myself to feel better about him being dead. But for the sake of coping, I try to believe it.
I want to be different-good, not different-bad
.
Nothing. I feel nothing. My psyche has flatlined. That’s a good thing. That makes it easy to heft the long-handled ax I wrenched off the white wall. It’s little more than a feather in my hands. I pull it up high, behind my head, and let it fall. Gravity does my dirty work. Gravity hugs the
blade close. Together they disconnect George P. Pope’s head from its body.
I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
Just a hole where my soul used to be.
DATE: NOW
I will not die with
my eyes shut and my heart in my throat. Not this far have I come to die a coward. My hand is ready, the scalpel tucked away in my palm: my bloody ally.
In the dark the Swiss grabs my throat, shoves me so hard against the wall my jaws snap shut on my tongue. Blood fills my mouth. I spit it into his face and laugh.
Can’t control the laughter. Merriment is helium in my balloon. My nitrous oxide.
“Why do you care? It won’t do you any good. Nothing can help any of us now. Soon we’ll be dead, too.”
His fingers are a ring tightening around my throat. One good squeeze and my laughter dies, bottling up below the seal. I see stars. I see a light hurtling toward me, and voices whispering just beyond. I have seconds until the end, and I’m taking the Swiss with me on the ride.
“Pope just had to screw with me one last time. And you’re wrong, you know.”
“I am never wrong.”
“This time you are.”
There’s a perverse pleasure in withholding what I know is true from this man in his final moments of life. So I do not speak of Pope’s final request: it might bring the Swiss joy.
There’s not enough room for a bold thrust, but the scalpel’s edge is more deadly than a razor. The blade skates across his throat, shudders as I scrape up the last of my energy to drag it sideways. The Swiss gasps; his pupils widen enough that even I can see them in this dim space.
His hand tightens. This is it. The end. Lights out. Ladies and gentlemen, Zoe has left the building. But he slackens and slumps to the
ground and his fingers slap against the concrete. I reach out, shove his face with my foot as hard as I can muster.
The voices are getting louder. The light is drawing near. This is it, my tunnel, my emergency exit.
Sorry
, I tell my baby.
Sorry I didn’t get to be a good mother, or any kind of mother. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our tiny family safe
.
Then my world flashes yellow and I see maybe the world has a surprise left in her yet. There’s no tunnel, and the voices belong to actual people.
Hopefully they will bury us far away from the Swiss.
SIXTEEN
DATE: THEN
A
re you for real?” Sergeant Morris asks the question across her desk.
A slow nod through air soup.
She pulls the vials and packets from the bag and lines them up. Soldiers marching across paperwork mountains.
The ground undulates beneath my feet. Or maybe I’m the one swaying to and fro. One palm flat on the desk doesn’t make a difference. My world is shifting sands.
“There’s more where that came from. But if you want it, you’d better move fast. There’s no security now, and the CEO is dead. It’s just a matter of time until the place is gutted.”
“I’ll send some people over. It would help if you’d go with them. We need all the meds we can get.”
“Okay.” My words tilt. I slap my fist on the desk, next to my hand. It’s heavy. The air is stew. No, I’m holding something. A white sack. Not a sack—a lab coat, the ends tied together to form a crude swag that would make Huckleberry Finn proud.
Sergeant Morris grimaces. “What’s in the sack? Shit, girl, it’s bleeding.”
“It’s nothing,” I say. “Nothing at all.”
“Nothing, my ass. Nothing doesn’t look like Aunt Flo came to visit and wound up moving in her furniture.” She tries to take it from me but it’s my burden to carry.
I sit, trapping the swag between my knees. “It’s nothing.”
DATE: NOW
I don’t die. At least
, not then. And for a time I’m not sure if I’m sorry or glad. My baby still lives, though, and that is something. It dances inside me, celebrating our victory. We are still two.
The sun beams at me through a window.
See?
it says. But I don’t. Not really. So I mirror its smile while I try to discern which of us is the village idiot.
The groan comes all the way from my toes when I sit, press a hand to my sutured wound so I won’t pop open like a worn teddy bear. I am surrounded by women. They watch me with wary eyes and sullen faces.
“What is this place?”
No answer. They chatter amongst themselves with foreign tongues.
“What happened to the man?”
They stare at the oddity in their midst. I have nothing more than cobbled-together sign language—mostly obscenities.
“Jesus Christ.”
The women cross themselves. Head to sternum. Shoulder to shoulder. Religious figures—those they understand. One of the squirrels breaks away from the pack. The rest of them stare at me as though I’m a spaceman. Maybe I am. I’m from another world, I know that much. We look at each other, all of us trying to find a way to bridge the language chasm. My language is, in part, descended from theirs, and yet the pieces that now belong to the English tongue are useless to me here.
I drag myself to my feet, one hand on my arm. Pain slices through me. I am white-knuckled, dizzy, displaced in this reality. Hands grab me, hold me steady. Mouths tsk.
“I’m okay, I’m okay. I have to keep going,” I say.
“You are going nowhere today.”
My head jerks up, because those are words I understand. Amongst the static they are clear and bright and shiny. They belong to a boy not yet old enough to scrape a blade down his skin.
“I went to the English school in Athens,” he explains. “My name is Yanni. In English, I am John.”
His hand dives into his pocket, retrieves a pouch filled with tobacco and a box of white papers. He crouches on the dirt floor, pushes the tobacco into a neat line on the paper using his leg as a table, seals the edge with his spit, and lights up. One of the women reaches out, flicks his ear. Screeches at him until his head sags. He offers me the hand-rolled cigarette, one end soggy with spit. “Would you like?”
Humanity has crumbled, yet here are people who would still instill good manners in their children.
“No, thank you.” I watch as he shoves the damp end greedily into his mouth and sucks deep. He can’t be more than eleven, maybe twelve.
“Where am I?”
He speaks with the women. Arms flap until they reach a noisy consensus.
“Not far from Athens. My people found you. They were looking for …” He puffs on the cigarette, drawing deep like he means it, flipping through his catalog of English words, looking for one that fits. “Supplies. Clothes and things we can maybe swap with other people.”
“There are others?”
Again he consults the women.
“Some,” he says. “And some …” He shrugs, tries to look cool as he flicks the cigarette ash. “My people do not talk to strangers.”
“You’re talking to me.”
“You are sick. When you are well, you will go.”
Sounds of children scooting a ball across the ground end the conversation. He drops the cigarette, grinds it into the dirt with a worn boot heel, his body humming with tension. Wants to run and join his friends.
“Wait.”
He stops.
“The man—the one who was with me. What happened to him?”
More talking. Solemn words.
“Your husband lives. But for how long, who knows?”
He must be mistaken.
All this world is theirs
to live in now, yet the Roma choose to stay here in their familiar nest of lean-tos and shacks with their suspicion of outsiders to keep them warm. But who can blame them? My clothes are brown with the blood of three. I wear blackface made of sweat and road dust.
They are wary; I am wary. Too many faces twist diabolically of late. My faith in my own kind has evaporated to mist. But when I reach out, my bag is beside me untouched. That small gesture lends me some hope that I am among those still as human as me.
DATE: THEN
Cups of steaming tea come
and go. Voices swim around me like I’m fish food. Faintly, faintly, I’m aware that my sanity is going walkabout, that I’m acting as though I’ve got one foot in an asylum and the other in a pool of blood. How much can a human mind take before it breaks?
Then he is there.
And here I am.
The desk groans as Nick clears an ass-shaped space and sits. I don’t look, but I feel the air divide as he leans forward and fills what was empty. He’s close enough for me to smell. No cologne, no aftershave. Just Nick. Made of sunshine.
“What’s going on, Zoe?” His voice caresses my cheek.
“The sky is falling.”
“Feels that way, doesn’t it?”
“It’s going to kill us all, one by one, one way or another.” My hand that is not my hand rubs my face. “He started this. All of it. We were an experiment. My apartment was his Trinity Site.”
“Where they conducted the first nuclear test?”
“He wanted to test his drug. No, not a drug: a weapon.” I tell him
the things George Pope related to me in the last few minutes of his rotten life. Nick listens with the attentiveness of his profession. When my words fade to ellipses, he remains taut, alert. And when I look up to him he is still wearing that old familiar mask, the one that stops me from knowing him. So many questions. Who are you? What happened to you on the battlefield? Do you cry for your brother? Did you think of me while you were gone? But the questions stick to my tongue like sun-warmed gum to a shoe sole.