Drifting
“There’s so much joy in life, so many pleasures all around, but the pleasure of insomnia is one I’ve never found.” That used to be my least favorite song on the classic radio station FM 130.9 back when the stations still broadcast hits, or had living, breathing people for that matter.
I roll over on the raggedy futon, swatting Who Needs Sleep by Barenaked Ladies away with the slap of a button, specifically a button on an alarm that used to belong to some goth chick. The posters of Black Veil Brides and Amy Lee hanging behind the futon stare at me with raccoon eyes that seem to say, existential crisis again? Don’t come crying to us, muchacho. I almost wished their black-painted paper mouths would speak audibly and degradingly to me, just so I could hear another form of intelligent life for once. With this pounding headache, though, I just might.
I look over at an empty bottle of vodka sitting on the adjacent bedside table, the obvious culprit to today’s migraine. There was a time when I thought I could get away with not sleeping for days, but since then I’ve lost the ambition as well as the people and projects over which rest took precedence. To say I regret wishing for more hours in a day would be an understatement; now I have more time than I never knew I didn’t need or want. As any living being can clearly see, drinking and growing out a patchy but not unattractive beard have become my only habits to fill these days and provide me with something other than this crap feeling. Now where the hell did I leave the Motrin?
Rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and scratching my wooly face, I walk to the bathroom and reach for the water bottle and a toothbrush. I take a swig of water, which does nothing to soothe my throat or throbbing forehead. Two capsules of Motrin make me wince as I down the capsules, creating friction in my dried throat. A cockroach scurries on the tiles as I shudder and squeeze a dollop of white gunk onto the bristles of my brush. I check the expiration date: one month past. I turn the hot water knob, then the cold one, out of habit and groan as one spurt of brown water chokes out of the faucet. Do I miss running water, cold or hot, that much? Yes, yes, I do. I shuffle into the kitchen area and grab a water bottle, then three more and shove them in my bag. Time to search for survivors again, I tell myself, after a sigh of exasperation.
I’m walking by abandoned coffee shops with tattered overhangs and broken glass doors, glancing carelessly at the derelict tabletops and scattered chairs. Everything inside is covered in dust that would form sepia clouds if stirred by the breath of the living. What I wouldn’t give to see swirls in a hot vanilla latte instead of this disgustingly stagnant air. I open the door and listen to the rusty hinges complain: everyone’s gone or dead, so scram! Hey, if hearing doors talk and other magic realism isn’t your cup of tea, then you’d best listen to the door. Don’t let me hit you on the way out, survivor scum. The peeling mermaid decal on the window looks less haughty than she did when the streets were bustling with people, cars, and the occasional vendor trying to sell knock-off handbags. Who knew how empty the world would seem without noise pollution?
I pull up a chair from the dirt-encrusted floor and decide to take stock of my situation. The AK-47 and duffel I’ve lugged around all afternoon plop to the ground, producing a hapless thud and a poof of dust. I sit at a table with spilled coffee stains on the wood, remembering when my old neat-freak self would scratch at it with my fingernails. That coffee smell would linger for days, in the same way the undeniable burrito stench latches onto clothing after working at Jalapenos, my favorite Mexican takeout place. This is where my best friend Alec, the queso to my chimichanga, and I used to talk shit about everyone we knew, everyone who laughed at us behind our backs, everyone who waved rainbow flags and spoke pride with their lips but conveyed mockery with their eyes, looking at us as if to scoop out our very souls. We knew the difference between real allies and lemmings, trust me. We bitched and cracked inside jokes, accepted the good parts of life along with the bad, while marketable indie bands streamed out of hidden speakers and the barista gave Alec longing glances out of the corner of her eye. Some people can never tell which way a person swings, or so it seemed. Silly girl, I thought at the time, but who’s feeling silly and lonely now?
I see long, streaking footprints in the dust. The moan is a long, hoarse emptiness that shakes me to the core. I jump out of my chair, grab my gun and fire two warning shots into the undead woman’s head. She falls backward and her head detaches from her shoulders on impact. How did I miss that going on? I don’t know, ask the talking door hinges because I’ve been too lost in thought all day to remember how to do caca. Well, except moping around and being a fallen hero for one person. Remember when some chick pulled that one saying out of her ass? You know the one: To be a hero, all you must do is save one person. It’s okay if that person is yourself. Lord, how I don’t miss seeing that smut all over social media. My sarcastic commentary will have to suffice going forward.
“A close call, indeed,” I say to the fallen barista, who was still wearing that pine green apron that was the pride and joy of many an employee of this fine, crumbling establishment. In the back of my mind, I worry slightly about copyright infringement as I glance at her ironic nametag and get my next one-liner ready for the audience of one: “That’s what you get for coming onto my man- you get served. Bye, Felicia.” It’s crazy I can almost imagine worried girlfriends with cell phones calling the police, or harried couples running out the door at such a scene. I’ve always been the white sheep of the family, trying to keep my hands clean while my cousins and father made a living on the black market. What they would have said if they were around today I can only imagine.
A slap to the face and boot to the rear. “You’re drawing attention to us, you little asshole,” my father would have muttered. It was hard enough trying to hide the fact that my boyfriend was completely unaware of my upbringing, just waiting at our usual café table mere blocks away from where the under-the-table deals took place. We started seeing each other at the same state college, but that’s a story for another necessary reverie.
After I take a mop from the back to clean the floor, a trash-bag to get rid of the body and a dustpan, I feel something close to being human. How long will it take until the local grocery stores run out of canned food? Sweeping the floor sounds like a stupid idea to anyone else, but it brings fond memories of home, of Mama’s baked goodies that served as a perfect rewards system for doing housework and maintaining sparkling grades. My bag full of ammo and AK-47 propped up against the wall almost look like the guitar she played after family meals. I can almost hear Peter, Paul and Mary streaming from our old sound system as I continue to sweep.
“Puff the magic dragon lived by the sea…” I blink tears out of my eyes as reality hits me once again and I continue to sweep. I try to distract myself from the situation at hand by thinking of a new name for this city and conclude that The Big Asshole is the most fitting. Where the light shines brightest, I can only see the darkness spreading out beyond the cityscape. This place has no hope or any kind of thing worth living for, as far as I can see. Also, It smells a lot like human excrement due to the inevitable decay of human remains. For some unholy reason, however, I haven’t lost hope.
An undead kid on a child leash drags itself along the sidewalk, the undead mother slowly plodding along a few feet ahead. I chuckle despite myself at this little parody of how life used to be. Alec used to point out my insipid happiness at the stupid, small things that made me laugh and confessed that they brought him great joy as well. Is he still out there somewhere, looking for me the way I’ve been holding out for him? Oh, what I would give to see his crazy auburn hair and golden eyes again.
I pick up my pack and provisions (including some stale scones from the display- surprisingly with minimal mold), and kick open the door like a sheriff about to give this town a dose of justice. “It’s about damn time someone challenged me to a duel!” The two bodies turn inquisitively toward the sound of my brash entry and lumber toward me. Planning my escape route, I pull out fresh ammo, lock and load. My buddy Vinnie taught me this trick before the siege, and I remember his words as I pull the trigger: “You’re fighting for the lives of those you haven’t met yet- trust me on this one.” At the time, I laughed chidingly and patted him on the back, but his words ring with a deeper meaning now. Lord knows why I have stuck it out without a soul to tell me what to do, but that dude could see the future, I swear it.
The echoes from the bullets ricochet off the walls of the concrete jungle I have called home for too long. Groans emanate from windows, seemingly empty cars and storefronts as I roll my eyes internally at myself. What a time to be alive, I think ironically, as I begin to run down the street and toward an intersection. The taxis, cars, a Winnebago and one Jeep Renegade crossing paths as if they had some place to be, someone to pick up, seem to be frozen in time. They all sit there, abandoned with glass and bumpers smashed in, yet today they fill me with hope. I’ve debated revving one of those engines to life countless times, believe me, but the temptation has always been overruled by the fear of the undead possibly hearing me, the engine stalling, and myself becoming dead meat. Not today, my dudes and dudettes. Today, I don’t give a shit. The damn café incident was my breaking point. Seeing a surly face that I once knew rubbed me the wrong way, and I refuse to stay quiet when set over the edge.
I jump into the Renegade and start to drive like my life depends on it- which it does. I begin to build up speed from a slow crawl, which shows how crappily this car is holding up in this heat.
Cruising past a newsstand, I can’t help but glance at the headline: Outbreak: Capsids Against Humanity. Here’s the kicker about biological warfare- it’s different from any plague, any natural disaster that humankind has faced. We can point to the cause and feel justified in any anger felt toward said cause, namely people who become public enemies to those still standing without a taste for flesh. I take that back- I have a taste for flesh of the one, Dr. Reeve. The arrogant prick who decided to unleash a host of crap on a nation deserves nothing less than capital and corporal punishment. He has accomplices, of course, who have escaped the confines of this fine city to bunker in Virginia, the only state that is still compatible with human life. Only the few who are wealthy enough to inflict this on an entire nation would feel my wrath if I got inside the confines of the Pentagon.
That’s when I find the walkie-talkie sitting on the windowsill above a dilapidated florist’s shop. It looks fairly clean, a vintage military issue, but I can’t tell completely from a distance. Need I remind whoever may read this that I am still having the ride of my life in the feisty Renegade. I can see how fast this situation’s likelihood of success is declining, so I jump out of the door and roll on the sidewalk, the Renegade still traveling at full speed, and duck into the flower shop. As the perfect distraction collides with a dinky Camry in the intersection of Forty-fifth and, big surprise, Gay Street, the flames and rush of heat incinerate enough undead guys to cause them to investigate. This is such a necessary reprieve for me, but I can’t get too comfortable too quickly. A few undead close behind me pound against the glass doors to the shop, but I block them with fallen metal shelves. A few gardening tools, hoe and shovel, the trusty broom for leverage against that damn door and we’re all set! Wait, the florist behind me isn’t alive, is he?
I turn, AK-47 in hand, shoot a round and zombie florist is down for the count. The rakes, hoes and broom are still holding the hot mess steady against the mass of bodies outside the door, so I turn and run up the nearest flight of stairs, listening for more moans and groans of the neighborhood. Hearing none, I run to the fourth floor, where I initially judged the outdated device to be. Who in their right mind places a walkie talkie on a ledge where the weather can damage it, a bird can swipe the thing or a zombie can gnaw on it? I can answer that for you: someone equally as desperate as me.
I think for a split second that maybe it’s Alec trying to say that he’s somewhere around here waiting for me. But he would be more traditional about a signal, possibly putting a white flag out or a letter asking me to “come home” in another place we used to frequent, like Broadway. When we wrote letters to each other during his session abroad, we slipped several innuendos in between the lines, as if we had a finite supply of paper. Drawings of eggplants and winking faces replaced punctuation in his replies, and I would snort like a wild animal reading these secret messages. See, I did it again. I digress far too often in recounting all the tragic moments leading up to this one, like living in the past and rotting away in the present, just like the undead who currently surround this crumbly apartment complex. If you must, call it a character flaw, like my imagining how angrily the poster of Def Leppard is screaming at me in this moment. “Pick it up, you idiot!” Sure thing, Joey Elliot, it’s not like I have anything else to do besides shooting dead guys in the face.
