Pittsburgh Storm

Chapter Omission

2009-11-08T21:48:00.002Z

It's been brought to my attention that Part 3, Chapter 6 has been missing from the table of contents this whole time. Whoops!

It's been amended. The story is understandable without the chapter, which is why it must have slipped under the radar, but it is one of my favourite scenes -- the climactic action piece for Part 3. If you've been reading with the RSS feed, (or if you bought the ebook) you would have received it because I did post it a while back. Those new readers who've been using the table of contents for navigation will have missed it though.

It's now on the right column: Part 1, Part 2.

Sorry!

Dave

Part 4, Chapter 5

2009-09-25T20:05:00.003+01:00

Eleven days between updates is a bit much, and for that I can only apologise, but lo and behold, here is the very final instalment of A Pittsburgh Storm.

If you've enjoyed reading the novel, then please go ahead and buy a copy from Lulu or Smashwords (the links are on the right) and support artists who do kind and noble things like give away their hard work away for free. If you want to give more or less than $1.25, or you want to cut out the middle man, then please feel free to use the donate button, which will direct you to PayPal. If you do any of these three things, you'll be visited by the holy angels of charity in the night, and who knows what they'll do in return!

But really, it's been a nice experience posting my work up here. I've received a lot of nice feedback and many thousands of visitors. Now that the whole work is finally posted, this site isn't going anywhere. It will still house A Pittsburgh Storm, and will be used to provide news on any news, updates, or writings of mine.

Now that the writing's complete, please feel free to send me any comments you may have. It's kind words and thoughtful comments that keep me going (because lord knows there's no money involved). And be sure to tell your friends -- particularly if your friend's a publisher, agent, or magazine editor!

Enjoy the final chapter.

Dave.

-------

5

I wake up. My vision is blurred and my breathing labored. I’m sat upright, resting against something. Martin crouches next to me, looking into my eyes, but falling in and out of focus. Behind him, I can see the loathsome tower of burnt furniture. Martin pulls his face back from mine and says something, but the sound is muffled. I can see the sweat on his face and the worry in his eyes. Then I see a body in the distance behind him: the second life I’ve taken. My jeans are red with blood, my own blood, clotting and sticking to my calf. The pain is terrible – I’ve never been shot before. Whenever I move the muscles in my leg, I stretch and tug at the wound with excruciating pain. I can see the trail carved in the ash where Martin has dragged me from the base of the tower, over to the sidewalk, to prop me against a fire hydrant.

The boy’s crying. “Are you ok?” he asks.

I can’t reply with words, but cough an acknowledgement. This satisfies him and a smile of relief crosses his face.

I stay on the ground for a long time, while Martin, crouching next to me, wipes my face and looks into my eyes, full of concern. We’re both exhausted.

It takes a while, but eventually the world returns to me, tactile and close. I can feel, again, the cold air on my face, and, when I put my hands by my sides, the soot that covers the ground, thick and slippery.

Somehow, I get to my feet, slipping on the ash, with one hand on the hydrant and the other on Martin’s shoulder, and I try to keep the weight off my injured leg. The wound doesn’t feel as bad as I expected it to. Maybe the shot just grazed me.

With Martin’s help, I stagger over to the stranger’s body, which still lays face down in the ash. Imprints of his final footsteps recede behind him and turn into Third Avenue. The man's dead face is turned to his left and blood pools beneath him, dripping from his mouth. This mixes with the ash and soot on the ground, turning it into a dark red paste. I nudge the body over with my left foot, half-afraid that the man could get up again and resume his assault. The moment I see his face I know this fear will never transpire because the right corner of his forehead is missing. His right eye has popped out, but I don’t know where it is. It may still be in there, but is now indistinguishable from the mess of pulp. The sight doesn’t disgust me. The sight is too alien to have any effect like disgust. I expect to hear crying from Martin, but he stands by my side, watching the body, as emotionless as myself.

I look to what was once our truck. Yellow flames lick the interior, reaching out of fire-cracked windows to flicker up at the sky.

I’m over stimulated, overworked, and tired. The situation takes on a surreal quality, distorted by waves of fatigue, and then further by waves of adrenaline that the pain pushes through my system. My hands are shaking. Does this mean I’m going into shock? And is there anything I can do about it?

“Let’s take a walk,” I tell Martin, meaning for it to come out as a question, but failing with the intonation and instead issuing a command. He doesn’t respond, so I start moving in a half-hop, south towards the Monongahela River. My butt aches from sitting down and my leg is in obvious agony.

My mind’s a blur and I feel lost. Of course, I know where I am, but I don’t know where I’m going. These days, I rarely know where I’m going.

Martin doesn’t ask any questions. He simply follows.

I keep my eyes on the streets ahead. I can hear the boy kicking a can behind me.

After a few minutes of painful stumbling, I find myself on the Penn Lincoln Parkway. I veer left and stumble eastwards, with the setting sun on my back. My left leg aches from supporting all of my weight and I doubt I can continue walking much further, but my body won’t allow me to stop. Not like this. Not here. Not now that I’ve come so far. Both Martin and I are silent; he knows as much as I do. He knows that we are walking, in a vague manner, towards Oakland, where I’m familiar with the streets and houses and still possess a key to my old apartment and the promise of shelter. Before I can reach these districts, I see the Smithfield Street Bridge, stretching out towards Station Square across a thousand feet of calm dark water. As we approach the bridge, the ashes blanketing downtown thin out. The bridge has been reasonably unaffected by the fire and on a whim I decide I would like to walk out along the pedestrian walkway, to take a seat and watch the river flow.

Martin draws up level beside me. Despite everything that has happened, he seems cheered by the view along the river, which looks out towards the low buildings of the Southside. Behind us, there is the impressive burnt out skyline of Downtown.

After crossing a third of the bridge’s length, Martin and I sit down and take a break. We lean our backs against one of the steel trusses and inhale the refreshing soot-free breeze moving up the river to join the Ohio, maybe a mile behind us.

Everything Martin and I owned was in the truck when it was set on fire. Now we have nothing but the clothes we wear, a machinegun a few blocks to our left, and whatever miscellany is left in my apartment. Moments pass and I search through my pockets for the photograph of Karen Spellman, in a bikini, with her pert breasts, tanned thighs, and firm midriff. I finger the photo in my left hand, and Martin looks over my shoulder in admiration of the girl. The sun shines bright in the picture, down on her browning skin, and a red bikini, skimpy, sexy, and unforgettable. She’s smiling her big smile, with straight white teeth, flirting with the photographer.

“Is that your girlfriend?” Martin asks.

“No,” I laugh.

“Then who is she?”

“Karen Spellman is her name but I’ve never met her. I found the photo and someone else told me about her.”

“Well…” I know the boy wants to say how attractive she is, but he’s only twelve, and most twelve-year-old boys don’t say things like that, since they’ve only begun to realize that girls can be so staggeringly beautiful.

We both know what each other is thinking and we acknowledge the pain we share. Karen Spellman stands in the photo, on a sandy Florida beach, oblivious of what’s to come. Her beauty emphasizes her loss and our loss and everyone’s loss. I’ll never see another woman. Somewhere, I know, is the body of Emily Jacobs, probably unburied. Somewhere else is the body of my mother, but I couldn’t guess where. Somewhere else, you could find the body of my father, perhaps, and my brothers, and my sister.

It occurs to me how much I’ve changed, after only two or three weeks of mind-fucking fuckups. After surprise transvestites, and dogs in grocery stores, and multiple killings, and the biggest funeral pyre in history at the funeral to end history, and smashing windows, and falling snow, and having gun’s pointed at me, and pointing guns at others, and finding a boy living alone in a once diner, now fort, and driving all day, and card games in the rain, and dirty jokes, and realizing that I’m in the last one percent of one percent left, with nothing else to do. And then, realizing that all I need to do in this new life is to look after one boy, and then doing just that, against all the odds.

“Where are we going?”

“I still have to keys to my apartment. It’s only about, well, thirty or forty minutes away.”

“We have all day. Is it nice there?”

“Yeah, you can see the museum from the window, and it’s comfy enough.”

“And there’s food?”

“Yeah, and clothes. And come summer, maybe we can go to the park – it’s not far – and plant some tomatoes, some peppers, zucchini, potatoes, carrots, corn. How’s that sound?”

“Sound’s good. Shall we go?”

“Sure. Let’s get moving.”

Martin gets up first, eager to resume the walk along the river’s edge. As ever, his energy impresses me. After a moment, he turns to me. I’m still on the ground, twenty years older than my age. He too suddenly looks somewhere in that age bracket. He holds out his hand and helps me up from the asphalt.

Part 4, Chapter 4 (Second Half)

2009-09-14T20:40:00.001+01:00

4 (Continued...)

I’ve been toying with the idea of going back to James’ old home. Perhaps, if I’m lucky, I may find James has returned there and is willing to team up with Martin and I. James is the only other person, aside from Martin, who I know I can trust. Despite this, I’m worried that James may know about Hank’s death, and I don’t know how he’ll react to me after such an event. In fact, it’s almost certain that James knows about Hank, as James would have crossed the Birmingham Bridge after me. Perhaps there are even witnesses to the event itself. I don’t care so much about punishment – I don’t see who is going to make justice their responsibility – but I’m aware than anybody I do find, like James, will prefer to ostracize me, and perhaps Martin, than to stick with a known killer. That could spell disaster.

Maneuvering the vehicle through the heart of the city’s devastation is laborious and monotonous. Every few yards I have to adjust our direction to avoid hitting various heaps of junk, burned out vehicles, and the contents of stores pulled into the street. I could have driven along the edges of Downtown, of course, by the Strip District, on the fast track to the East Pittsburgh regions, but curiosity pushes me on this awkward and convoluted route. Downtown Pittsburgh is relatively small, so I know this wont take all day. But then, we have all the time in the world.

The sun is high and bright and bakes vivid detail into everything it touches. Under such a glare, the familiar Downtown surroundings seem all the more uncanny. The sunlight beams down, filtering through thin wraiths of black smoke that rise from charred remains of car, building, postbox, and awning. The only sound is the familiar engine of the four-by-four, like a moon buggy on a dusty, dirty, alien planet. The heat of the fire evaporated any snow in the region. Even so, during the journey to Pittsburgh, I’d noticed a distinct thinning of what was once a perpetual blanket of white. In the outskirts of Pittsburgh the snow still lies thick, but with asphalt creeping up from underneath. Here the blanket is one of unrelenting soot and ash.

Maybe the old man, Saul, was right about one thing: maybe Spring really is on its way.

Martin gazes out of the truck window and watches the destroyed city move past. This is the first time he has seen Pittsburgh since the world went to shit. This may be the first time he has seen Pittsburgh in years. I expected a more visible reaction from Martin, perhaps tears, I don’t know. Although, if the truth is told, Martin, like myself, has been so desensitized by the preceding weeks that he doesn’t know hot to react. I have to keep reminding myself that Martin has already witnessed the deaths of each member in his immediate family. He’s had the horrible opportunity to look upon each lifeless corpse and know that it was once an animate and loving individual in his life. Gazing out of the window, the bodies of these strangers, once frozen in the snow and now charred by the fire, are surely the least of the boy’s concerns.

The truck rolls through Downtown and ahead, I can see PPG Place, with the ice rink by its east side. Looming above it is the complex of towering glass – the same towers that Hank and I had watched from a rooftop in the Southside, as a stranger pushed office furniture out from the windows and yelled obscenities into the wind. The high glass buildings that make up the PPG complex are visible from miles around. Now this huge monolith of the capitalist ideal is a warped and melted tower of weeping glass. Behind it, the thirty-one floored granite Highmark building on Fifth Avenue stands charred and wounded. Its huge pyramid roof that once poked defiantly into the sky now stands dirty and purposeless.

As gusts of wind usher ash out of the ice-rink and into the street, curiosity keeps me edging the vehicle forwards through the debris. Martin, of course, is unconcerned and unaware of what this place could represent. However, I can taste the tension in my mouth; a dry, bitter clogging in my throat.

“Martin, you know there’s a gun in my backpack, right?” I ask. I don’t want to concern him, but I’m unnerved and could do with some company in that feeling.

“Sure, yeah I know.” He looks uneasy.

“Will you get it out for me?”

“Why?”

“Just— please, Martin.” He at least needs to be aware of what’s going on. To keep his eyes open.

Martin clambers into the back seats, finds my bag, and tugs at the straps holding the gun. I slow the truck further as we round the corner of Stanwix and Fourth. Aside from the cars, which were already there, now hundreds of filing cabinets, desks, office chairs, wastepaper baskets, photocopiers, fax machines, computers, telephones, and notice boards litter the street. A few of the items have been scattered into separate clumps, perhaps with an attempt at some kind of order, but the majority stand in a huge man-made mountain. I can only guess at what many of these objects once were. Now they are blackened, charred, and crumbled out of existence. They sit in a broken ash pile, bits of steel and scrap poking up here and there amongst solitary surviving pieces of desk-frame and filing cabinet. This monolith must have taken days of non-stop labor to build. It must have been under constant construction since I last saw the plaza, when I was leaving Pittsburgh. Martin climbs back into the front passenger seat, handing the unloaded gun to me and staring at the pile in wonder. “Whoa,” he says as he drops the ammunition clip into my lap. The street is impassible in the truck, but I want to examine this tower of destroyed corporation, on this cold and still day amongst all these other high rises. If I drive away, this moment will stand as another of those many moments in the past few weeks, where witnessing the signature instances of mankind’s decline took a backseat to my own health and stoicism. This moment will stand next to the time I left the Oakland riots when they became too intense, and I returned to my apartment on Craig Street to find Emily worried and waiting. It will stand alongside my decision to hole myself up in my apartment for a week, while all around me the world changed, devoid of my input.

I open the driver-side door and step onto the ash. The sound of the door’s mechanism and the light tap as my foot hits the ground echoes in the otherwise total absence of sound. The fire has even scared the birds away. Every so often, I hear the rustle of a light breeze, like flicking the pages of a book, and see the flitter of drifting ash.

“I’m going to take a closer look,” I tell Martin. “Stay in the car, ok?”

He looks at me and raises his eyebrows; he doesn’t want to be alone. I nod my head and he in turn opens his door, sliding off the seat and placing his feet on the ground.

Completely calm with my heart racing, I load the ammunition magazine into the gun and hold the weapon loose by my side. I’m conscious of the weapon’s misleading weight. Martin comes up a few steps behind me as I approach the blackened tower of office junk in the middle of the street.

In a way, the tower’s beautiful, stood there in all of its sooty haphazard grandeur.

Once I arrive at the edge of the tower, I begin to climb. It’s the only sensible option that faces me. The grime is thick, but enough metalwork is contained within that climbing is much easier than it initially appears. Occasionally, pieces of the furniture shift as the tower accommodates my weight. Then sometimes my foot slips on the thick ash, which covers the tower, and also my torso, legs, arms, hands, and face. Behind me, Martin is following a similar route.

We climb in silence; save for our own ragged breaths. I reach up, landing my hand on a wastepaper bin, which tumbles away beneath me, clattering and bouncing to the ground below. I watch the billows of soot that rise in its wake.

Finally, I attain the summit of the structure, pulling myself up onto the flat edge of a filing cabinet. The manner of its placement makes it look like pedestal. I’m confident that the tower’s builder placed it here (though I couldn’t guess how) so they could survey the surrounding courtyard. This unnerves me because, all along, I’ve known who the builder is. This tower exists because a twisted mind decided to put it here and I’ll never forget seeing, from across the river, the twisted mind in this building’s windows.

Finding my feet upon the filing cabinet’s side, I turn in circles, taking in a panorama of the unbelievable carnage. Moments later Martin joins me. Looking down on the ground below, I can see five other small piles, stacked only a few objects in height, arranged in a ring around this central peak.

Martin has also noticed these stacks. “That’s weird,” he mutters.

I nod in response as I puzzle over their significance. Five of the smaller stacks stand around this central cone. A realization clicks in my mind – an image from the past. I try to explain to Martin what I see, and the possible significance of the pentagram.

“Who put all of these here?”

“I saw someone here, weeks back…”

Martin waits for me to continue.

“He was in one of the PPG buildings, throwing all of this junk out of the windows.” I want to tell Martin that the madman was yelling, swearing to the heavens, and that he sent chills down my spine, which remained there for days, but these aren’t the kinds of things you should tell a kid.

We stand in silence for a moment. Martin stares at the base of the giant tower. I stare down the street, at the eastern corner. This is why Martin is the first to notice the corpse lying a few feet below us, on the far side of the mound. The corpse of a large dog, burnt and charred, destroyed save for its bones: its distinctive skull and a small wiry rib cage.

“What?” Martin says. He’s crying again, with tears running through the soot on his face, leaving streaks like the reverse of mascaraed drunks crying outside of nightclubs and bars on a loud, after hours Southside or Strip District evening. Martin’s appearance would be comical if it weren’t so heartbreakingly tragic to see the boy’s soul crushed.

He looks to me and we simultaneously understand what we stand upon. The dog was a gift and this tower is no pedestal, but a sacrificial altar. And furthermore, the pentagram indicates that this was no innocent ritual.

Martin’s look of panic is contagious. “Time we got out of here, eh?” I ask and usher him ahead of me, down the tower, back in the direction of our truck. Utter fear replaces the sense of uneasiness that has possessed us for the last thirty minutes. Fear of an unknown malevolence that holds too much sway where we stand. I tighten my grip upon the machinegun and hold it at hip level, looking around to the ground far beneath us. Martin is only a few feet lower than me and I’m panicking — fear taking over my better judgment. I need to get off this tower.

We clamber down, our faces into the ashen dirt, missing handholds and footfalls in our rush.

We’re several meters from the ground when the architect of this grand alter makes his appearance. His casual manner makes it seem that he’s been hiding for the past few minutes, aware of our presence, and waiting for us to become scared enough for his theatric entrance to have its full effect. My face whitens beneath its soot covering as I crane my neck at the sound of his approach. He holds a small handgun in one hand and a burning torch in the other. Frozen on the edge of the precarious tower, I feel like a butterfly pinned into a collector’s book.

This new character is too far away to make out details, yet I’m convinced that on his face a smile has spread. He stands by the truck, gun in hand, and looks up at Martin and I. I’m no longer so sure that I want to be off this wretched tower and closer to this gun-wielding madman. A heartbeat passes and he tosses his torch through the vehicle’s open door. He looks back to us, to gauge our reaction, I suppose, and our horror is clear. Then he takes a step away from the truck and towards the tower. “Everything must burn,” he says in the still silence of midday, his voice deep and old. “This is our punishment,” he gestures to our shared surroundings. “This is retribution for mankind’s sins. Now everything must burn. Everything must flicker and burn and die.”

“Don’t go any further,” I say to Martin in a cracked voice. “Stay where you are.” I clamber past the boy. Ash cakes my throat and my breath comes out in ragged gasps.

“The world was supposed to end,” the stranger announces as he observes my descent. “Both of you, it was supposed to end. But some things lingered on. We did, for instance. And that’s not good enough, you see. We’re still here. ”

Standing directly in front of Martin, his hand on my shoulder, I gain enough of a footing to turn my body towards the dark haired stranger.

“You see, it’s not good enough!” He raises his gun and points it at me; the second time I’ve had a gun pointed at me today. “Not good enough. Something went wrong, but I’ll fix it! I’ll fucking fix it as easy as—”

And there’s a crack in the air, and a ping sounds immediately afterwards on the metal frame of an office chair a few feet to my right. The bullet pulls soot behind it and caves a segment of the structure.

Another heartbeat passes, I try to raise my own weapon, but two more cracks ring out. One of the bullets strikes me in the leg, spins me around, heavy and clumsy and with excruciating pain. I lose my balance and look down: a few of meters of jagged burnt scrap. I meet the ground with astonishing swiftness.

The next thing I’m aware of, Martin is an impossible distance above me and I’m rolling from my back onto my stomach. I look ahead and see the anonymous gunman strolling towards me. Then I notice my arm extends out in front of me, along the ground, pointing towards him. A second ticks by like an hour and I notice that the machinegun is still in my hand and still within my control.

So I pull the trigger and swear through my teeth.

A series of cracks rattle through my ears into my skull, and simultaneously along my arm, into my torso. My entire body convulses with the force and shock. The stranger’s body convulses significantly more my own as bullets shred through him. I’m filled with relief because I know he’s dead and that Martin and I are safe. This thought comes as I lose consciousness for the second time.

And the world fades to black.

Part 4, Chapter 4 (First Half)

2009-09-06T12:10:00.002+01:00

Well, I'm at my new home, and in a new job. Things have finally settled, so updates should run a bit smoother. This is a small one, the first half of the fourth chapter, working to establish the climax of the novel. I hope you all enjoy it.

There's been a massive surge of visitors these past few weeks or so, which is really satisfying to see, and there's been a big increase in the number of books bought, which is awesome. In case you missed it, you can pick up your own copy of the entire ebook, using the links on the right, for only $1.25. If that feels too measly for such a volume of work, then by all means, please donate through paypal. Or read it all for free, when I manage to get the updates online.

If your one of the many new visitors, don't forget that the whole thing starts right here.

Anyway, I'll post the next update on Thursday, September 10th.

Enjoy your week,

Dave

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4

Most of the ride back into Pittsburgh passes without much event. Martin and I make small talk, but we’re both too preoccupied with the concluding drama at Saul’s home to progress much father than that.

And although it’s a touchy subject, Martin asks me again, after a couple of hours on the road, “So what are we going to do in the city?”

It’s only a touchy subject because I don’t know the answer.

I think maybe I once understood my plan, but now, in the face of what’s happened, I’m no longer so sure. If nothing else, the conflict with Saul has served to emphasize how helpless this situation is. I’m no longer actively trying to improve my situation because I feel like nothing I can do will ever help. Ultimately, Martin and I are fucked no matter what. So instead, I simply glide along, wherever the road may lead. I make gestures of action and defiance, but little more. Taking Martin under my wing was all along, perhaps, only a gesture. It’s a gesture to nobody in particular, maybe only to myself, and indicates that I’m progressing somewhere and working towards something – whatever that is. Returning to the burnt out city of Pittsburgh is only another one of these gestures, because it proves to the world that I’m doing something. I’m aware of the futility of it all as I drive the truck south, down frozen, dead, aimless roads, but I don’t know what else to do.

So I don’t reply to the boy’s question and he doesn’t push the subject any further. We both know the answer, so we sit in silence.

Hours pass, and we eventually enter the city boundary again, driving through the northern edge of Pittsburgh, back towards Downtown, and like I said, it’s not because there’s anything there, it’s because this feels like the logical thing to do. Of course, it feels logical that we should head Downtown. If anything were to happen, that’s where it would be, right? But when Pittsburgh was still alive, only weeks ago, Downtown was a pure anomaly. During the daytime, it was busy mainly because of all the offices there. Retail and living in the Downtown area was almost non-existent. In the evenings, most of the area’s life stemmed from the theatres in the cultural district and at the baseball and football stadiums across the Allegheny River. And that was it – all of the life in Pittsburgh centered in the Strip, or the Southside, or Oakland, Shadyside, Squirrel Hill… So I doubt this would be the centre of events at all, but returning there simply feels like the right thing to do.

At this moment, on this clear day next to Martin in this rusting red monster of a vehicle and miles from anywhere, we can see how much fire damage Downtown has suffered. And behind it, swathes of the Hill and Strip District smolder. From miles away, we can see the rising smoke and ash.

It takes hours to make it through the northern end of the city. We have to leave the parkway, because of the abandoned cars that block huge sections of the road, and instead take the smaller roads and intermediary links. As we cross the Fort Duquesne Bridge, the fire damage astounds us. Many of the trademark high rises of Downtown Pittsburgh are now little more than charred, smoking monoliths, gutted on all sides, their contents spewed out onto the streets below. Anonymous debris clutters any spare space on the streets, blackened and destroyed.

I idle the truck on the bridge exit, and we take a moment to catch our breath and digest the surreal vision. I almost expect devils to fly out of the holes in these charred towers. The sight is so bizarre, dark, and hellish, the sight of winged nightmares wouldn’t seem in the slightest bit misplaced. This is straight out of Lovecraft.

Careful to avoid debris on the road, I roll the truck forwards, across the cluttered bridge, and into Downtown.

Part 4, Chapter 3 (Second Half)

2009-08-26T15:31:00.002+01:00

Updating this blog-book has been a nightmare as of late. For that, I can only apologise, as I have done at the start of the past three or four updates.

Here's the second half of Part 4, Chapter 3, as way of redemption.

Enjoy!

Dave.

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3 (Continued)

“Get your things, Martin,” I say. “We’re leaving.”

The boy still lies on the ground. Blood covers his head, but he appears to be more worried about me than for his own health.

Saul coughs and rolls onto his side. Blood comes out of his mouth in a thick red river and drips to the ground.

“Get your things, Martin!” I shout this time, and martin struggles to his feet. Uneasy on his legs, he hobbles to the front entrance where our bags stand. He stops when he sees the blood on his palm, and his mouth opens in shock. “Don’t worry,” I say. “It looks worse than it is.” He nods through the tears.

I walk over to him, looking back at Saul on the ground as I pull my jacket on and tug a hat over my head. “I'm sorry,” I say with all sincerity to the boy and he nods again in dumb reply.

Saul is rocking on his side, coughing, as Martin and I carry our bags outside.

*

Quickly, we throw our bags into the truck. It’s cold outside and we can see our own breath. Our bodies are still running on adrenaline; my own body feels like it doesn’t even belong to me, as if I’m watching these events from afar, utterly disconnected from the situation. The sensation of autopilot is so intense.

We climb into the cab of the truck, without exchanging a word. I fumble for the keys, stick them in the ignition, and attempt to get the vehicle started. The engine keeps growling and spluttering, but nothing more. The truck faces Saul’s home, so Martin stares alternately at me and then at the home’s open door.

Back and forth, as the engine growls and growls and finally roars.

As the truck kicks into life, Saul emerges from his home, bloodied and limping. He is too far away for me to read his expression, but close enough for me to notice he is carrying his rifle again. He raises the gun to shoulder height and points at the car. My stomach drops.

Martin yelps and I yell at him, “GET DOWN!” Saul stares into my eyes and I stare back into his own, and I see nothing. An eternity passes, I turn to look behind me, and kick the vehicle into reverse. I can feel Saul’s eyes drilling into the back of my skull, and with them, the barrel of the rifle he holds. I continue to reverse the truck down Saul’s long sloping driveway, as fast as I can handle, and towards the main road. I turn my head forward again and Saul is walking down the driveway to follow us out, still holding the rifle at shoulder height, still pointed at the truck. Martin fidgets and I warn him again through tight set teeth, “Stay down!”; just to stay down a little while longer.

And then I roll onto the road, as simple as that, and swivel the car to face south. Martin pulls himself up over the dashboard, timid and curious. I don’t reprimand him. We can both see Saul watching us and as we pull away, he drops his rifle back to his side, his chin falling, sorrowful, into his chest.

“Are you ok, Martin?” I ask.

He doesn’t reply.

A long time passes.

“I’m sorry, Martin.”

“I know.”

Silence fills the air between us as we stare out of the windscreen and at the curving road ahead.

Part 4, Chapter 3 (First Half)

2009-08-16T13:34:00.003+01:00

Again, I'm sorry about the slow updates. I'm moving apartment (again!) today, so it's been a busy week. Enough excuses though, here's the first half of Part 4, Chapter 3. There are only three chapters left after this one, and it's at this point that conflicts start to come to the fore, and we see the resolution on the horizon.

I'll post the second half on Thursday, and I'll even schedule it into the Blogger program, so I don't forget.

Enjoy your coming week.

Dave

-------

Chapter 3

The next morning I wake to the noise of somebody moving around in the living room. I drag my lethargic body out of bed and stumble through the doorway. I know I look a comfortable mess. Martin is awake, groping through his backpack. It occurs to me that throughout the night, my own bag has sat in the corner of the room with the machinegun strapped to its side. This realization gives me a brief sense of panic until I notice that the gun hasn’t moved an inch since I left it there. The relief washes over me in a cool wave.

“Hey,” martin says with a smile. “How’d you sleep?”

The reaction from the boy cheers me, as for the first time since arriving at Saul’s home, Martin has shown enough confidence to start talking again. I know this is because Saul isn’t in the room. I don’t understand the boy’s aversion to the man — Martin has never displayed any nervousness around me, so I know he doesn’t worry about strangers. Saul is old. Saul is black. Saul is a loner. Any of those things could be an explaining for the boys attitude. “Yeah, I slept fine thanks,” I say. “It was great.” I look around the living room, uneasy in another man’s strange home. “Is Saul awake yet?”

“Yeah, he uh—” Martin pauses long enough to shrug his shoulders. “Well, he went out earlier, but I don’t know why. He thought I was asleep when he left so he was quiet about it.”

This strikes me as odd. “Oh, ok then. I guess I’ll make tea.”

*

While Saul is gone, Martin and I sit around the coffee table in the living room and talk. I ask Martin about his school life, trying to unearth why he was often so insular and shy, but after much digging I get no closer to understanding his reasoning.

Martin tells me about a particular teacher at his school who, in an effort to combat Martin’s shy nature, would make him read aloud in front of the class each day. Martin despised this, but his English skills were far exceeding those of his classmates who were denied the same opportunity. Martin laughs about how relieved he is, now that he will never go through that ordeal again, and we hear Saul turn the handle on the front door. The boy’s laugh falters. It’s a terrible way to react, but I’m inexplicably worried for my own and Martin’s safety. Saul’s mysterious disappearance didn’t concern me too much, but his silent approach upon the house is uncanny and unnerving. As he fumbles the door open and walks into the room, I’m on the edge of my seat.

Saul looks at us, aware of the strange atmosphere. He smiles, surprised and innocent.

“What?” he says, gesturing to his hands. He holds several small logs of wood. His smile turns to an amused smirk. “I was only getting wood for the fire.”

*

Noon approaches. Through the remainder of the morning, Saul and I sit in the living room and he tells me stories from his life. I know that he enjoys the role of the older man who passes on knowledge to his younger protégés. I know he doesn’t do this often, so I rarely interrupt his narratives. He tells me about the time he enlisted with the military, stationed in Israel in the 1950s, jumping from planes, fighting with his superior officers, landing himself in military hospital and finally military prison. He tells me of when he was stationed in the Egyptian desert, watching the huge battleships move slowly along the Nile. In that endlessly flat landscape, the ships look like they sail through the sand instead of any misplaced waterway.

As Saul tells me of beer, cigarettes, and violence in an intolerable heat, Martin sits by the fireplace, poking at the burning logs with a metal rod.

Saul tells me how his love of literature came to fruition. He’d started a fight over a beer tab. Things didn’t go his way and he woke up in an Egyptian military hospital with a knife wound in his stomach. Bored shitless in the hospital, he turned to reading to pass the long hours. He borrowed books from the meager hospital library and stole others from a rich British soldier in the next bed. He repeatedly devoured J.B. Priestley’s, An Inspector Calls, and several of the patients staged a performance of the play with Saul’s direction. Then when Saul was transferred to military prison (because the other combatant was an Officer), he turned to books again to survive the harsh environment in which he found himself. Saul had heard rumors that military prison was supposed to be an easy affair, but his own experience was far from this. He found himself the only black man in the complex. This was unusual and he was soon an outcast, despite the camaraderie normally found in the armed forces. From that time onwards, books saturated Saul's life. His method escape from these hardships was through the musty pages of old hardbacks, the quiet flutter of paper, and the overwhelming swarm of words as one flicked through a tome. Saul buried himself in those pages and words and never left, retreating into bibliophilia, loving his books more than anybody or anything else in this world.

Perhaps this explains his violent overreaction to Martin’s accident.

As Saul recites his stories, Martin entertains himself with the fireplace, nudging the wood with the steel poker, causing the flames to surge and fume, taunting the fire and losing himself in fascination. I watch the fire dance as I listen to Saul’s tales of his youth. When a chunk of wood falls from the fireplace, much to Martin’s dismay, it takes me a moment to react. It takes Saul longer. He notices my reaction first, and then turns to notice the burning log. Already Martin is trying to scoop the wood back towards the fireplace with arwith a, but in one regard, it’s too late. The unfortunate casualty is a copy of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. A flame licks it’s dusty, peeling cover, and fries the top pages. Martin bats the burning wood away and it rolls to the base of the fireplace where it rests on the hard flooring. Then he hits the flickering novel and puts out the burgeoning fire, leaving a jagged hole in the books centre.

Saul stands in silent disbelief and stares at the novel. He scoops is up from the ground, still hot, and holds it before his face. “What—” he begins. An eternity passes, and he continues to stare. Martin looks to me, nervous. “Saul?” I ask.

But he just stands in the middle of the room, cradling the book. “Oh no,” he says in a flat tone. Then he repeats himself. “Oh no, oh no.” I can’t grasp the depth of his devastation. It seems so alien. How is he so upset over a single book when surrounded by so many thousands more? Like a child who damages a toy and decides that toy had meant the world to them. Saul is so self-absorbed that he fails to place such a small loss in any reasonable proportion.

I ignore Saul’s lamentations for a moment and turn my attention to the burning wood on the ground. I pick up the two open beers on the coffee table and pour them over the flames. Then I turn back to Saul and The Pilgrim’s Progress. The old man holds the book away from his body at waist height trying to ascertain the damage, which is greater than I first realized. Again, he says, “Oh no, oh no.” The smoke from the extinguished wood fills our lungs. It brings back images of burning down my family home. Now, that was loss.

Martin’s face is a mask of worry and horror. “It’s ok, right?” he says to Saul. When the boy fails to evoke a response, he turns to look at me. I stand a couple of feet away. I don’t know what to do, or even if there is anything I can do. Instead, after Martin and I make a brief eye contact, I shrug my shoulders in a gesture of reassurance and turn to wait out Saul’s bizarre reaction.

“Look what you’ve done,” Saul says. He shakes his head and repeats himself, spitting through clenched teeth, the book held in the firm grip of newly appeared anger.

“I’m sorry,” is all Martin says.

I try to defuse the situation. “Saul—”

“Look what you’ve done.”

“But, it’s alright?” Martin says, as he reaches up to touch the book. I’ve broken out in a sweat. The perspiration on my forehead is a shocking cold, like electricity through my brain. My arms have begun to heave and wobble as adrenaline surges through my body. I’m nervous of what’s going to happen next and worry that Saul’s reaction could manifest itself physically. Didn’t he only just say he was once holed in military prison? I know something terrible is about to happen — I can read such a reaction in Saul’s bloodshot, bulging eyes.

Saul steps slightly away from Martin; more like his body veers an inch or two to the side. “No, it’s not alright,” he says with his teeth set tight in anger. “It’s not alright!”

Martin utters an upset, “But,” and retracts his hand from Saul and the prize the old man grips.

And Saul snaps.

“Does this look alright, you little fuck?” he yells at Martin. This from the man who only one night previous had told me how much of a responsibility Martin must become to me. “Does this look alright?” He thrusts the book close to Martin’s face, so the boy can see what he’s done. Martin takes a step backwards in fear.

“Hey, Saul!” I yell. He was right last night. He said the boy was my responsibility and so I won’t let the old man bully him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

But Saul doesn’t hear what I say. He’s too absorbed in his own anger. He’s not angry at the book’s value diminished, or even angry that Martin committed such an accident, instead he is angry that something has been taken from him. He’s angry that he has had to deal with another loss. Perhaps this is why he has imposed such an isolated lifestyle upon himself. Perhaps Saul has been through more loss than any reasonable mind should have to cope with. But that excuses nothing.

All that loss is a mute point as I watch this old ex-military man advance on a twelve-year-old boy, tears on both of their faces and my own body pumping with new fury.

“Saul!” I yell.

“Please!” Martin begs.

“You little fuck,” the old man screams, clutching his book. “You little fuck!”

And the boy is tumbling backwards, tripping on the raised tiles of the fireplace’s terracotta base. The tiles are cracked and lined with soot and Martin falls towards them with a yelp, cut short by a thud, his head cut short by the hard wall. He’s on the ground, crying, a long drone at first, and then a hoarse intake of breath, before a wail cutting through my ears.

Saul’s expression has changed. He heaves air into his lungs, panicked at what he may have done, horrified at what he has already done. Then my own emotions of anger manifest themselves in physical outrage at Saul. I see blood around Martin’s head.

“You old fuck,” I scream. “You dirty — you bastard fuck!”

And then I’m running at him, my peripheries burring, the boy’s screams filling my skull and Saul turning to face me, in slow motion, in horror. My fists are pounding the old man and make contact with his bald head. He drops backwards to the ground and I follow him down, screaming. “You fucking bastard. A boy! You fucking bastard. I could kill you!” Somewhere behind me, I know Martin’s bleeding. And really, really, I do, for a moment, try to kill Saul, wishing him dead as I continue to pound my fists through my ragged breath and a lip bursts or a nose bursts and my knuckles are numb and Martin’s crying has stopped because he sees what’s happening and, somehow, I’m dragged back into the world with an unconscious, maybe dead, old man beneath me, with red running down the black valleys of his creased face and blood on my own knuckles. I roll back and lie on the ground. All three of us on the ground, and all three of us wondering, what the fuck has happened? What the fuck has happened? How the fuck did this happen?

*

“Get your things, Martin,” I say. “We’re leaving.”

Part 4, Chapter 2

2009-08-09T20:02:00.001+01:00

I know this is pretty late, but here's Part 4, Chapter 2. If you enjoy it, please consider buying a copy of the ebook using the links on the right, and supporting a first time writer.

All the best,

Dave

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2

I maneuver the truck up Saul’s driveway later that day. Upon hearing the truck’s engine, the old man appears at his door, again holding his rifle at shoulder height. I know he won’t shoot, he did this the last time I arrived too, but the experience is still harrowing. Martin, in the seat next to me, draws a breath and mutters in fear, but Saul soon recognizes me and lowers the weapon. His softening expression appears behind it.

“It’s ok, Martin,” I say. “This man’s a friend of mine.”

“Some friend!” he responds in disbelief.

I stop the vehicle several yards from the home, climb out, and walk to greet Saul. Martin trails behind me. Saul remains stock-still, resting on his gun as if it’s a walking cane and beams a smile towards us.

“And now there’s two of you!” the old man exclaims. For a self-professed hermit, he seems happy to have company.

“This is Martin,” I respond, gesturing behind me. “He’s the only person left in Bramble.”

Despite this news, Saul smiles further and reaches to shake Martin’s hand. The boy reluctantly accepts the gesture. “It’s good to meet you, Martin,” Saul says in the warm manner that befits old men so well.

Martin, unnerved, blubbers, “You too, sir.”

“Yes, well.” Saul replies. He looks at the boy in a long uncomfortable silence and then turns to me in a gesture of hospitality. “You should both come in, of course. I’ll make coffee.” He turns to Martin, “Maybe I have some lemonade for you; I’ll have to take a look around the kitchen.”

*

Saul is excitable and eager to tell me what’s happened while I’ve been gone.

“There’s been a fire in the city! You could see the smoke billowing up from the Northside or maybe Downtown, and there was a hell of lot of it. It’s windier now – you can’t see it so well – but yesterday afternoon, once you left, I could go up the hill behind us and see the thick clouds rising from the south.”

Such an event seems fitting.

“I guess I'm surprised it didn’t happen before,” I respond.

“The world works in strange ways; only when everyone has gone does the big fire hit. You must admit though, it’s exciting stuff.”

“Oh yeah, definitely.” This is only half-true. My agenda was to go back to the city, and now that plan’s gone up in smoke too.

Saul smiles with a black humor and moves into the kitchen to arrange drinks. Of course he knows he shouldn’t be excited by the fire, but maybe, outside of books, this is the first interesting thing to happen to him in years – aside from the whole apocalypse thing. The guilty excitement reminds me of when, as a young teenager, I visited a family friend in small-town Massachusetts. While I was there, a storm broke out. A dispute within the local authority meant that nobody had cleared the drains for some weeks that autumn, and the town was flooded with several feet of water by the end of the day. Despite our best efforts, the water ruined much of the ground floor of my friend’s home, so we sat in his bedroom, upstairs, with the rest of the family across the hall, and we watched the road outside turn into a river. I had no idea when things would be clear enough for me to go home, and the material losses were nearly incalculable, but I’ll never forget how exciting it was to watch all the junk float down the street.

Saul returns from the kitchen, carrying a kettle, and puts it over the fire to boil. “So how were things in Bramble?” he asks.

“It was deserted. Really strange – but I don’t know what else I was expecting.” Martin nods his head in agreement from the other side of the coffee table. Saul waits for me to elaborate. “You know, I went there because, well, I guess leaving Pittsburgh was about leaving my responsibilities, maybe just symbolically, and going to Bramble was about finding my family, who were responsible for me instead.” Saul nods. “I wanted to find someone else who could do the hard work, I guess. Maybe my family, sure. Yeah, and seeing my family was important, but—”

I pause and Saul raises his eyebrows, waiting for me to finish.

“Well, like I said, there’s nobody left.”

The kettle on the fireplace whistles as the water boils, so Saul climbs out of his chair and makes tea. I turn to look at Martin who still looks uncomfortable. He stares about himself as he digests the strange environment that the bibliophile, Saul, calls home. He turns his gaze to me and I give him a reassuring gesture. This appears to cheer him up.

Meanwhile, Saul has returned to kitchen, from where he yells through to us. “While you were gone, I finished a book I was reading. I meant to have read it years ago after a friend in New York told me how much they enjoyed it, but I’d put it off because this friend was a bit of a tool – he was the curator of some shitty art gallery in Manhattan. Sorry.” He means he’s sorry for cursing in earshot of Martin. “The gallery was some junk about painting mattresses. But anyway, the book was Crime and Punishment. Have you read it?”

“No. Is it good?”

“Long. I’ve heard people say it’s poorly written; I think Hemmingway said so in a book of his, maybe in A Moveable Feast…” his voice fades out in thought and possibly because he’s trying to find clean mugs. “But I enjoyed it regardless.” He drops something on the ground with a clatter. “So near the end of the book, after six hundred pages or so, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, has these delirious dreams while he’s locked up in prison.” He returns to the living room, without the tea, and picks up a copy of the book. “Listen to this,” he says as he flips through the pages and digs out a bookmark. “‘He,’ Raskolnikov, ‘dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen.’ And the plague, you see, is this plague of ignorance, kind of. I mean, it makes everyone think that they have found the one and only absolute truth and this means that everybody has these unchangeable notions of right and wrong different from everybody else. So communication falls apart in the face of anxiety as everyone thinks all those around them can’t grasp their same truth. And so, for instance, armies will be fighting and it will all fall apart as the soldier’s start fighting within their own ranks. The soldiers all think, as individuals, that they’re right about what they’re doing and that everybody else is wrong and they’re unswerving in this opinion. That’s the idea behind Dostoyevsky’s virus. So, he goes on, here and there, ‘men met in groups, agreed on something, swore to keep together, but at once began on something quite different from what they had proposed. They accused one another, fought and killed each other. There were conflagrations and famine. All men and all things were involved in destruction. The plague spread and moved further and further.’ And this is the bit that really stuck in my mind, listen, ‘only a few men could be saved in the whole world. They were a pure chosen people, destined to found a new race and a new life, to renew and purify the earth,’” he pauses for dramatic effect, “‘but no one had seen these men, no one had heard their words and their voices.’”

Saul puts the book down, with pride. “Isn’t that a great image? A great portrait of humankind’s mentality? I love it. This plague brings the worst in us to the surface. And that’s why we see horrible things like looting. We always wanted to do it and a situation like this provides the rationale. And then at the end of it all, the inability to help yourself out of your desperate situation transpires into you waiting for some great third party, some man in the sky to lift you out, like Dostoevsky’s ‘pure chosen people’…”

It seems that sometimes when Saul talks to you, it seems he is only talking to himself and you happen to be there, willing to listen. Not that your willingness to listen has anything to do with it. He’d tell you anyway.

*

An hour later, we sit drinking tea and telling stories about our lives before the plague. We sound like those old men who sit in the park and drink one-dollar McDonalds’ coffee. The conversation wanes. After a brief silence, Saul tilts his head to the window and announces, “I think spring is on its way.”

As normal, Martin and I wait for him to continue.

“It will soon be that time of year. I can already feel the weather easing up, slowly but surely. Soon enough the snow will begin to thaw and the green will reappear. It can’t be long now, boys. The birds will fly back north and carry on their lives as if nothing ever happened. The earth will renew itself and repair the damage we’ve all done to it. Give it a few hundred years and Pittsburgh, and New York, London, Paris, and all those, will be like the Incan cities we keep finding buried in the rainforests.”

This topic has been on my mind for days. “Yeah,” I contribute, “I can almost see the archaeologists digging all of this up again, in years and years, and finding a, uh, a…”

“A spoon.”

“Ha, yeah, a spoon, or a cell phone, or something, and looking at it like it holds a key to the mystery to our civilization, and sticking it in a museum.”

Saul laughs with words, “Ha ha ha. Imagine them trying to figure us out, when not even I understand all that bullshit.”

We both laugh again, but Martin is uncomfortable. He turns to me and bluntly asks, “So are we going to stay here now?”

I don’t know how to respond. I begin with a denial, because this feels like an accusation, stop myself after a syllable, then I try to utter an affirmation, but stop again. I compromise. “Maybe for a short time.” I turn to Saul. “Is that ok?”

Saul nods and hums a high note of welcome.

Martin’s annoyed by the state of affairs. He stands up and states, without emotion, that he is going to the bathroom.

He leaves the room and Saul looks at me with solemn eyes. “You have a big responsibility with this boy,” he says. “Don’t fuck it up. He may well come to hate you, but don’t fuck it up.”

*

I spend my second night at Saul’s home, but this time, out of respect for Martin, I only get slightly drunk. It’s an enjoyable evening. Saul cooks more root vegetables, which are much better than they sound, and Martin has his first beer.

Later that night, in a room half library and half office, I lie on a couch, tucked under in a thick, warm sheet. The beer making my mind swim, and I stare at the ceiling, illuminated by candle light. The roof is unevenly plastered and the bumps and grooves on the gray surface make me think of how the moon must look once you get close enough. It looks like the moon from a mile out. I daydream like this for a while, studying the valleys and craters in the ceiling and listening to Martin snore in the bed I slept in two nights ago. Saul is in his own room and sleeps silently under the light scream of the wind outside. The room is warm and comforting. I know the wind outside would freeze my bones and I’m eternally grateful for Saul’s hospitality. I find myself regretting my earlier, bizarre evaluations of Saul. I judged him as awkward and emotionless. I’d taken a flight of imagination, coming to a judgment based on his social anxiety, communication problems, and erratic hand gestures. It was unfair.

I look at my fake moon surface, the shadows of the peaks and valleys ebbing and flowing in the ever-changing light. I imagine swooping through the crevices on a most literal flight of fancy. A while passes in daydream before I lean over, blow out the candle, and lie there with my eyes closed. My thoughts take on the rhythm of Martin’s snoring; slow, heaving, lumbering thoughts, on moonlight, on what I’ve lost and on what I’ve found.

Sleep swims up to greet me, but of course, that’s an event I can rarely recall.

Part 4, Chapter 1 (Second Half)

2009-08-02T22:21:00.001+01:00

Here's the second part of Part 4, Chapter 1. I'll post Chapter 2 on Thursday. Enjoy it!

Dave

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Chapter 1 (Continued)

After stalling the old engine several times, we eventually arrive at the shallow hill leading out from Bramble and begin to head back towards my parents’ old home, or at least what remains of it. From there we’ll get back on the highway and head into Pittsburgh. It feels like half a plan because there’s no motive behind the journey, other than that it simply feels like the right thing to do.

Later, with evening creeping over the horizon, Martin asks about the half developed motives behind my plan. He still has that social immaturity which allows him to ask such blunt questions without consequence. Prior to this question, Martin and I had filled our journey with conversations about movies and comic books. It found genuine glee to discover that Martin was reading the same comics that I’d read as a young teenager, and occasionally into my current twenties: Batman, Swamp Thing, and Spiderman, to name a few. He told me how his best friend had given him copies of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, some of the best superhero comics ever written, and I filled him in on my own theories surrounding these texts, concocted during my adolescence, and refined using my literature study’s terminology and theories. This was pure self-indulgence; I’d never had a captive audience like this when it came to my ideas about comic books.

But eventually he does ask the difficult question burning in the back of my mind. “What does Pittsburgh have that we don’t already have in Bramble?”

I have to think for a moment, so I squint my eyes, pretending that I’m paying attention to my driving and a tricky bend that may or may not be in the distance. As much as I want to treat Martin as an adult, I know that this is too much to ask of him. This is how I know I’ll never let him use the gun I found, despite my earlier deliberations, and this is why I sometimes have to adopt this patronizing tone. I loathe my patronizing tone.

“Well, because there are people there, I guess. And there’s plenty of food. Shelter. Maybe even electricity soon. Who knows? Any progress will be made in the city rather than out here.”

“But we have food and shelter already. There are no people, which is good because then that means we don’t have to share the food, and it means we’re safe too, right?” This last comment makes me wonder what the boy had seen in the past few weeks that made him so afraid of other people. But then, he wasn’t afraid when he first saw me. In the end, I guess making amateur psychological guesses about those who have gone through such trauma is pointless. “I like it with just the two of us,” he adds.

This kind of attitude gives me a headache. When I’m trying to sort something out and I don’t have a clue what I'm doing, but I’m doing my best, I don’t want anybody calling me out on my naivety. “How do you know what you like yet?” I ask with a sideways glace.

“Of course I know what I like.”

Like I’ve said, although I want to treat Martin like an adult, I don’t like him questioning the things I’ve failed to question enough by myself. I’m the one forced to make the big decisions here because of my age. It’s a situation I don’t want to be in and that’s why I resent these questions. These questions are like admitting failure before I’ve begun.

“We—” I need to think over my reasoning some more, so I pat my jeans as if I’m trying to wipe dirt off them, crinkling my face in confused disgust. “What do you expect will happen when we run out of canned food? We’ll both be full of gout or scurvy or something when that happens, sick of soup and chili. You think that between the two of us we can do something like farm enough to eat, or even find enough in this town to survive on?”

“Why not?” he asks.

This question really pisses me off.

“Look,” I snap, “you’re just a kid, ok?”

“I can be grown up.”

“You mean mature? Not grown up. And is that what reading comic books and playing Gameboy for two weeks in a diner is all about?”

The kid starts to cry, not because of what I said, I think, but because everything he has been through rushes back to him when it dawns on him that maybe I’m not his savior, and that maybe he still does have to look after himself. He’s been though more than any kid his age needs or deserves. He sobs a few times, lowers his chin to his chest, and wipes his face. Then he notices my sidelong glances and tries to act tough and composed. He’s unsuccessful. My comment, it’s now apparent to me, was childish in itself, and I’m clearly ashamed to make a child cry.

“The only way we’ll survive,” I say in a calm tone, “is in a city. Somewhere we can establish the essentials, and get a system figured out. Despite what happened at Mecca, this is still true.”

“What’s Mecca?”

“Where do you think I’ve been all this time?”

I fill him in on the details and he doesn’t bat an eyelid at the unveiling of Sylvia. It would seem that he doesn’t know about the misogynic qualities of this plague and I decline to mention these in my recount of the story. I know that I need to tell him about this, but I can’t bring myself to do so. I’ll let it wait for a while. Maybe in a couple of weeks when things have settled down, I’ll be more comfortable about doing it.

The truck winds through the country while we sit in silence. Evening takes hold of the day and overhead the last of the sun’s rays breaks through bare tree branches.

“Do you have any children?” Martin asks with no preceding relevance.

“I’m only twenty-two, Martin.”

“So how old are people when they do have kids then?”

“I don’t know. Thirty? It depends on who you are — if you find yourself in a good relationship — those kinds of things.”

“My cousin, Amy, had a baby when she was seventeen.”

“Wow,” I say with a genuine interest.

“I think it was seventeen. One night I was sitting with her boyfriend, who’s now her husband, and his best friend on my parent’s back porch. He told us, real quiet, that this had to be a secret, and he made real sure we understood that. He said that Amy, my cousin, had gone with her friend to try to get the baby removed from her.”

“An abortion?”

“Yeah, right. There were people there though, he said, they were with signs, and yelled, because they didn’t want abortion to be allowed. So Amy’s boyfriend, Tom, he told us that she started walking over to the place and one of the people shouted right in her face that she was a murderer. And so she cried and ran back to the car.”

“So she had the baby?”

“Yeah, but Tom said he didn’t like the idea.”

“And, hang on, you’re sister—”

“My cousin.”

“Your cousin was sixteen?”

“Yeah.”

“What does she do now?”

“You mean before she died?”

I wince with guilt. “Yeah, of course.”

“She worked at the drugstore, and she’s at University too. She wants to be a nurse.”

“Emily wanted to be a nurse. I mean, she was doing her medical training.”

“Who’s Emily?”

“She’s— she was my girlfriend.”

We’re silent for a moment.

“Do you miss her?” Martin asks.

*

Emily woke up the next morning with a cough. By noon, it had worsened to invoke her entire body in guttural and wrenching heaves. The prolonged periods of dry retching drained her of energy and left her lying, fatigued, on the bathroom floor, before I carried her back to the bed. The news media informed me that by the next morning her immune system would no longer react to the virus in her lungs, so the coughing would ease. However, it would mean that she was then helpless to the encroaching illness. Soon enough, it was her stomach protesting the virus’ onset and she could no longer swallow any of the food or drink I gave her. Her face had paled and her temperature was running high.

I stayed in the apartment with her for the rest of the day. She was worried for her life, as was I, but I no longer feared catching the infection myself. I knew that if I was vulnerable it was already too late; I’d seen the ease in which Emily had caught the virus. I assumed that I too had contracted the infection during the night, only the virus was following a longer incubation period in my body and so the symptoms might remain incognito for some time. This was my layman’s understanding of virology. But I was wrong, of course.

“I want to go home,” Emily told me that afternoon. She meant that she wanted to return to her parent’s place, a short distance away in Squirrel Hill. Her parent’s were hippies, living in an old house full of eccentricities. They had garbage cans painted with leopard-print and a three-foot statue of Buddha sat in the fireplace of the living room, whose head and belly I was always encouraged to stroke and to which I always obliged. I understood Emily’s desire to return there. It was always so warm and welcoming. I promised we would go there the next morning. Secretly, I think I knew this would never happen.

We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about love and life, while I helped her sip water – food was still out of the question – and cleaned up her thin vomit. It was strange to do this for her; strange that it had become my responsibility to care for her. Normally, Emily was strongly independent. In the past, she shied from showing her real emotions, for fear of exposing a weakness. Financially, she provided for herself absolutely, often taking two jobs on top of her university courses rather than ask her parents for money. Now she was helpless and needed me to clean up her bodily fluids. I can’t imagine a situation she would have found more embarrassing.

Through the window of my apartment, that afternoon, I watched the slow deterioration of the city. As it grew darker outside, the windows in turn reflected the deterioration occurring in my own private world. After a two-year relationship with Emily, she came to define my life. Now she was coughing blood and the edges of normality had long since crumbled.

“I don’t like you seeing me like this,” she repeatedly said as the night passed.

I tried to understand and I tried to reassure, but most of all I tried to stop myself running away from all of this. I still loved Emily but those hours, which soon became days, weighed heavy on me. Running away appeared so easy that it gathered a romantic aspect of its own. Of course, it would have been a terrible thing to do. I know that and that’s why I didn’t do it, but given all that time to do nothing but fantasize while she slept, I could see myself packing my bag that night and… and the next thing I would be on the road. Not happy, but a romantic loner, with the road my only friend, and the great frontier ahead. No worries. No responsibilities. None of this.

But I didn’t go anywhere.

That day and the next passed with little event. As Emily became less and less lucid, she became the shadow of the woman I once knew, trapped only in the physical concerns of her failing health. Meanwhile, I observed the world around me likewise fall into decay. The Oakland riots had occurred two days prior, and now Craig Street was a mess of continual looting. There were few things left to steal from the already ravaged area, but people still streamed through, yelling, smashing, and fighting. For what appeared to be nothing more than carnal joy, looters trashed what remained of the Carnegie Museum across the street. I took a sadistic pleasure in observing the surreal image of two men carrying a giant Monet down Forbes Avenue, towards the Cathedral. Perhaps it now hangs in a tenement block in The Hill District.

And everywhere else in the city, chaos ruled the day. Many people tried to set fire to the University of Pittsburgh’s iconic central building, The Cathedral of Learning. The heavy stone in the building’s construction meant that many of these fires were stillborn. At most, when you passed through Oakland, you could see flames flickering from office windows in the building, spreading at a pathetic and stunted pace, just as the fire wardens assured us would never happen.

Conversely, fire gutted what was once the Hillman Library. The wooden interior and mountains of books had burned for days, like the wick to a huge candle. Mountains upon mountains of information reduced to a useless ash. I wish I’d visited the library after the flames had died down, to see the extent of damage to the cavernous study halls. I’d already witnessed a bonfire of desks in the Cathedral’s main hallway, piled high and hollowed out as blackened and charred skeletons of their former selves – it was an amazing sight. These were scenes I didn’t want to miss.

And these were scenes of such a surreal quality, they kept my mind distant from reality.

But Emily still died the following morning, quiet, though labored. She didn’t say a word; she didn’t have the energy to speak. She looked at me with wide eyes and then, full of aspirin and ibuprofen, stopped. I said her name, searching her face for any response.

“Emily?”

And silence filled the room, returning abruptly after I had deemed to interfere with it.

I wasn’t filled with sorrow, or pity, or regret. Instead, I was angry with myself for being so emotionless. I pulled the bed sheets over her body and left the apartment for a few hours to escape the horrible reality. I found myself sat on a bench in the emptiness of the university lawns, considering life and death. Later, as the sun arrived at its apex, I reluctantly shuffled through the snow back to the quiet apartment.

That evening, when Emily’s father pulled up outside the building in an old sedan, I was crying by the doorway. He walked over me greet and we stepped into the building’s foyer with his lower lip endlessly quivering.

“I’ve come to pick up Emily. She’s here, isn’t she?” I didn’t reply and he continued to speak, guessing the worst, his voice cracking. “Her mother’s ill.” He paused. “So I am I, but not so bad yet.”

“I’m sorry, but you should have come days ago.”

“I tried to call but the phones are out. Besides, I knew she was safe.”

I cut him off. “She wasn’t safe. You’re too late,” I said, motioning with my eyes the floor above us. Emily’s father glanced with me, distressed, and ran to the stairwell. I heard him cry out as he reached the floor above. I turned on my heel and waited things out back by the doorway.

Hours later, I stood aside and watched as he carried his daughter’s body to the car, tears running down his bearded face. I watched the car drive away down the cluttered street and I didn’t say another word for days.

Part 4, Chapter 1 (First Half)

2009-07-30T23:55:00.003+01:00

This is the beginning of the end, quite literally. Part 4 is the culmination of everything to happen so far in A Pittsburgh Storm. Coming up we have some shoot-outs, arson, a new major character, and then maybe somewhere along the way, Matthew will finally find what he's looking for. Maybe. And like I haven't said it enough times, if you're impatient to see what comes next, you can just get the ebook for $1.25, with the links on the right. You can even get the paperback if you're ritzy.

This chapter's pretty big so I've broken it in two. Expect the second half on Sunday.

Dave

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Part Four

Downtown

1

The sun is high and I know that the town of Bramble, with all of its abandoned vehicles and potential transport, is only another fifteen minutes walk. The burning house may draw the attention of any other survivors in the area and I'm excited to see if I meet anybody on their way to investigate. I attempt to calculate the probability of someone else from the town being alive.

Pittsburgh had a population of, I guess, three hundred thousand. The metropolitan area had about two million people, I think, but I don’t know where the metropolitan area ends. I compromise and place the population of the city and close surrounding area at six hundred thousand. There were about fifty people in Mecca, and I figure it’s possible to double or triple that figure to guess the total number of survivors in the city. The next part takes a while to figure out as I walk along the bends and curves in the road. Six hundred thousand total population divided by one-hundred and fifty survivors leaves a figure of about one survivor out of every four or five thousand. I need to allow for a huge margin of error. Bramble, Pennsylvania, had a population of six thousand. Maybe there’s one person there now? Maybe five, ten, or none? Does living in an area of lower population density have anything to do with the figure when you consider an infectious disease? Possibly.

Although the snow on the road has drifted deep in places, the walk into Bramble is pleasant enough. Winter birds chirp in the trees and the sun glistens though overhead branches creating a spider web of shadows on the road. The winter must end soon and this spring, unlike any previous spring, will be a season where regrowth of the environment will also be a reclamation; nature reclaiming the earth from man, slowly erasing his impact. It all starts now. Slowly reclaiming more and more, year by year, until only crumbled ruins will remain and then, after millennia, nothing at all. Lawns, crop fields, and houseplants will run amok. I can’t help but wonder at what any civilization in hundreds, thousands, or millions of years time will think of this human race. I imagine a civilization similar to the one I have already known. If they start from scratch, maybe their knowledge will head in a different direction than ours. Maybe, rather than initially focusing on theology or faith and then allowing the sciences to stem from that, their science will start elsewhere, perhaps astrology, biology, or physics, and any theological sense will arrive from there instead. Perhaps they’ll worship Pi and the perfection of trigonometry. Perhaps not. Maybe they’ll evolve as normal and then one day learn how to extract the data from our old computer hard-drives, or decipher the text in our dusty, decaying libraries, making a huge leap in knowledge in only one or two generations. The wild speculations are endless during this easy walk.

I remember one time, when travelling through Europe as an exchange student, visiting a roadside attraction in Wales called King Arthur’s Labyrinth. It involved taking a boat ride down underground rivers, deep into a cold, breezy mountain cave system, to see comical recreations of the King Arthur myths using old shop manikins. At the time, I laughed with my travelling companions to think what future civilization would think of this bizarre set-up. Surely, a collection of plastic men beneath a mountain would be on par with the inexplicable stone heads of Easter Island. Now, I can’t get that image out of my head.

I approach Bramble town center and, like Pittsburgh, the streets are a mess, though fewer inhabitants mean the carnage is tamer in scale. I walk down a long hill onto the town, with the community college on my left, then a medical clinic, library, and a collection of small bookshops. The clinic is ruined. In its last days, it must have been overcrowded and abused. Now it’s quiet and still, no doubt filled with bodies. Beneath the snow, the sidewalk, cracked and spoiled, pounds against my feet. To my right, the bare forest watches my stroll down the shallow incline, until I turn onto one of the town’s main streets and leave the empty hollows behind.

The sun is bright and for the first time since I can remember, I’m uncomfortably hot.

I emerge by the side of a Korean restaurant into the town square. Small businesses and two drugstore chains surround the area, which houses a small garden in the centre. The frontage of Rite-Aid has been smashed up and the building’s contents spilled into the street, covered up by fresh snow. I look back in the direction I came from and spot the smoke from my family’s old home, perhaps a mile away. I wonder how long it will take the fire to stop. Six hours, maybe? I walk across the square and stub my toe on a brick buried in the snow. I pick it up and turn it over in my hand, feeling its weight. I drop my bag to the ground and then, in a moment of whimsy, I throw the brick through a window of the Korean restaurant, so I can watch the destruction and enjoy the sense of power. The sound of the breaking glass carries easily through the otherwise silent air and surrounded by the new noise, I suck in a lungful of the invigorating and refreshing cold.

“Hyahh,” I yell in happy exultation. I both roar and yawn, stretching my arms above my head, satisfied and awake to the sensations around me.

I kick around the square for a while, unwilling to do anything else; there’s no reason to rush myself. I look into what was once the window of a bookstore, checking if there’s anything worth taking, but looters have devastated the interior and I can’t muster the energy to dig through the chaos.

I grab my bag again and slink along side streets, eyeing up any cars I come across, looking for any vehicle suitable for a journey back to Pittsburgh. It’s as I'm doing this that the young boy yells from behind me, “Hey, Sir. Hey, wait!” The voice is full of excitement and relief and, for the first time, the encounter with another human doesn’t scare me; so reassuring is the boy’s tone, and so relaxed is my own psychology. The boy runs towards me, waving his arms, bearing a huge grin of satisfaction. He must be no older than eleven or twelve.

“I can’t believe I found someone,” he yells, as I remain silent. “I thought everyone was, you know. Like, everyone – I thought—”

I maintain my silence. I must appear emotionless and imposing to the boy, but really, the sudden energy of the situation has caught me off guard. In response, the boy slows his erratic gestures and glances and instead looks straight at me. “Hey, are you alright?”

I’m scaring him, so I pull myself together and display my own genuine sense of relief. “Oh yeah, I’m fine,” I laugh. “Sorry, you surprised me there. I’m sorry.” There’s a grateful silence, where the boy smiles. “Have you been here alone all this time?” I ask. “Is there anybody else?”

“I’ve been, yeah— There’s nobody else in town at all, I think. You haven’t been here all this time, right?” I shake my head and he continues. “I’ve been staying at Judy Mullen’s place, just over the square.” He points, but I already know where he means. Judy Mullen was the hostess of the town’s best diner, Judy’s, and therefore she’s a local celebrity. Judy’s made great breakfast eggs and fried potato, and those breakfasts became symbolic of my time at high school.

“Yeah,” I smiled. “I know Judy’s.”

We’re quiet for a moment and the boy’s expression wavers. The next time he speaks, his voice wobbles and cracks. “My parents—,” is all he says. I know that this boy has been though more in these past weeks than any kid his age should ever have to go through.

“Listen,” I say, trying to reassure him. If he starts to talk about his parents, he’ll be lost in depression and he may drag me in with him. “I'm going to head back into Pittsburgh. I know you don’t know who I am, but maybe, if you want, you should come with me. I think it would be for the best if we stuck together.” I feel like we have to do this and I think I would enjoy the company. Furthermore, maybe the role of protector to this kid could at least give me a direction. Only moment’s ago I was wandering an old town square in the snow, throwing bricks. Maybe this kid could provide a reason for this otherwise aimless existence.

“Oh, man, Sir—”

“Sorry, I should have said earlier. I’m Matthew.” We shake hands and the kid smiles further.

“My name’s Martin,” he tells me with pride.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Martin.” I formulate a plan of action. “Maybe you can show me where you’ve been staying? We need food and a car. Specifically, we need a car that can deal with all this snow. Have you any ideas? Have you seen any around?”

He seems like a good kid. Very polite and grateful, and this makes him a pleasure to be around. We go to Judy’s and he shows me the bed he made on one of the longer booth seats. It occurs to me how strange it is that he would choose this diner for a home, amongst all the red and while porcelain and the plastic covered seating, rather than a house, which would be more comfortable by a magnitude. He’s eager to explain his reasoning. “There are too many things going on in those houses,” he says. “Like ghosts.” I know what he means. There are too many memories and traces of other people. Those homes should have been rarely if ever, empty. I feel the photo of Karen Spellman in my back pocket and remember how all of these ghosts can live on in the imagination. These people will never be seen or heard again, yet in a way they live on, if only in our minds. “The diner is like, it’s like it has everybody’s memories, so it’s like it has no ghosts at all, or maybe so many that none of them matter any more.”

He has comics and books strewn across the tables in the rear corner of the building. He also has a large stash of batteries, which he's been using in an old hand-held Nintendo Gameboy. Amongst multitudes of Little Betty Crocker Cookie wrappers and Oreos is the boys screwed up blankets. “I had to leave my home,” he says, “because somebody broke the window. It got too cold with the wind blowing through it. And then we were running out of food too.”

“We?”

“My family— before—”

He looks down at the ground. His body is thin with brown hair hanging limp over his forehead. By all appearances, he would have been classed as a nerdy kid when there were others around to judge him. Perhaps this is why he reminds me of myself.

“So, what have you been doing for all this time?” I ask.

“I was building defenses.” I can see these ‘defenses’ piled up by the front window of Judy's; a jumble of wood and garbage cans. He’s made no effort to give the materials much of an overall structure. They are no more defenses than a cocoa bean is a Hershey bar. I look back at the boy and raise my eyebrows in question and he reads the expression with ease. “Well, I was building defenses, but then there was nobody left to defend against.” I wonder at how he ever coped during a time when he had to barricade himself into a diner to protect himself from what had become of the people he had once known. Then I ask myself how I had ever coped with that, and I recall that the dead body on the Birmingham Bridge stands as testament to how I haven't coped at all.

After I take in the surroundings Martin has constructed, the pair of us go for a walk to see if we can find any suitable vehicles, perhaps to go back to the city in, perhaps to go and see Saul again, or perhaps to do something entirely different. Martin promises me that his old neighbors have a battered, but usable, four-wheel drive in their garage. It should still be there, he says, because he hasn't seen the family in weeks. And he's right. When we break in to the garage, there is indeed a huge, red, rusting hulk of a truck. What’s more, from all outward appearances, it’s in a usable condition. While Martin hunts around the rest of the house, looking for truck’s keys, I attach chains to the wheels, in order to maintain traction when driving in the snow.

As I finish, Martin returns with the vehicle’s keys and stands by my backpack, which I left by the door. A moment passes and Martin notices the machine-gun, wrapped in an old sweater, and strapped to the bags’ side. Considering the boy’s age, his excitement seems justifiable. He asks to see it, but he means he wants to attempt shooting something. In theory, I find it objectionable to be excited by a firearm, like to do so would be trivializing the items unique quality of violence. Then I recall how it felt to hold and fire the weapon for the first time myself. How I felt as I peppered holes into a car at the roadblock. Then again, he’s only a kid, and kids shouldn’t do those kinds of things. And then a third time, his parents are no longer around, which means he’s his own boss, because I'm not going to claim that position. I consider how much he’s had to deal with in the past weeks, and I consider how fast he’s had to grow in that time. I consider all of these things and deduce that he’s perfectly within his rights to ask to use the weapon. He’s been through a lot, so I should respect that and let him make his own choices. So I agree that he can shoot the gun sometime soon. Maybe he’ll need the practice. Neither of us know who or what waits around the next corner.

I’m a bad driver to begin with, and I’m rusty because I don’t drive in the city, but in an automatic vehicle, going slow, with no other traffic or rules to obey, driving is much simpler than I remember. After Martin and I open the garage doors, I reverse the truck out across the front lawn, across skeletons of rose bushes, and into a mailbox. I suspect that this is the first time Martin has laughed in weeks, and I feel the same way. The boy’s face turns red and he doubles over in hysterics, watching the mailbox buckle and snag, as I pull the truck out into the road. I raise my arms at him as if to say, “Not my problem! They shouldn’t have put it there!” and he laughs again, stood amongst our bags and supplies.

He climbs in the passenger seat and we wind through the town in the old red four by four at an excruciating pace, slowly heading back towards Pittsburgh, with a planned stopover at Saul’s home. Martin makes small talk while I concentrate on driving.

“So, did you see any other kids in the city?” he asks.

“Nobody younger than seventeen or eighteen.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t really think about it.” I don’t ask Martin if he’s noticed the absence of women yet. I imagine he hasn’t and there’s no reason to upset him.

There’s a brief silence and we watch a deer dart along the side of the road.

“So, do you think that I could be the youngest person there is now?” Martin asks.

“I don’t know. How old are you?”

“Eleven.”

“Is that so?” I ask rhetorically. He could well be the youngest survivor for hundreds of miles.

“But I bet any kids younger than me wouldn’t even be able to take care of themselves. I mean, even if they didn’t get sick, like us, I bet they’d have trouble finding food, and a place to sleep, and a place to hide. You know?”

“Yeah, I understand. You know, I think you’re right.”

There’s a brief silence as Martin considers the consequences of being the youngest person alive.

“Man,” the kid says with an odd, excited tone. “That’s going to suck!”

We both laugh. It feels great.

Part 3, Chapter 6 (Second Half)

2009-07-26T23:42:00.002+01:00

Here's the end to Part 3. Part 4 will start on Thursday. Enjoy the update, and hey, why not just buy the whole thing right now, for only $1.25, with the links on the right?

Dave

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6 (Continued)

In the morning, the candles have burned down to stubs surrounded by waxen waves.

I ignite a pile of coals in the garden’s barbeque pit, next to the rear porch awning. The morning is clear and sunny, though cold, and I decide it would be pleasant to eat outside. While the coals heat up I go up to my old room to see if I can find any clothes worth taking.

I find clean, dusty boxer shorts in a cupboard, an old, threadbare Metallica t-shirt, a pair of jeans, and a sweater, all left there because, three years ago, I knew I would never wear them again. I go into the bathroom and examine my new outfit in the mirror. “Sex-machine!” I laugh.

My family’s toiletries stand on the bathroom shelf and I'm shocked at how little my family’s possible whereabouts now weighs on my mind. Shouldn’t they have taken toiletries with them when they left? They took all the food, after all. I assume they’ve all died. As horrifying as that is, it seems logical. The problem is that I have so little feeling left, I’ve become so numb, that it’s difficult to show any genuine emotion. I’ve lost track of time, but it wasn’t long ago that Emily died too. My struggle over the loss of her life waned and faded as I received a heavier load to bear. Something important inside of me has gone. It left a week ago as I sat by my apartment window and watched a body cover with freezing snow on the Carnegie Museum’s plaza. All I have left is a growing lump in my throat and a burning behind the eyes. That’s where grief goes when you swallow it down. It hides there and waits to catch you by surprise.

I feel sick at my own sense of unfeeling. This is why I start a fire of newspapers in the living room of my late family’s home. After I eat my barbeque-cooked oatmeal, I gather clothes, and any amenities I can carry. Then I take one of the red-hot coals indoors, and watch the orange flames flicker up the living room’s wall, watching the smoke sweep, thicker than expected, along the ceiling. After a few minutes, the couch catches flame, which surprises me. I figured that all modern couches were fireproof. It looks like an upholstery company somewhere needs to do a recall. As the heat and smoke becomes too uncomfortable, I open the living room windows and climb out, pulling my pack behind me.

From outside, I watch the fire spread through the home for a few minutes. As each item burns, chars, or melts in the inferno that I created, another piece of my past life is exorcized from my mind. The weight of memories and familial responsibility is lifted from my shoulders. When Mecca fell, I had mixed feelings of disappointment, anger, and frustration, but also relief that I was able to escape the commitment it called for. The commitment I felt I owed my family pulled me all the way here, killing another man in the process and almost killing me too. I’m relived to be rid of it.

Though I didn’t found my parents, two brothers, and sister, I feel like I’ve returned my debt. I tried. Maybe they went into the city to find me. Maybe it was only my father who went to the city, as the rest of my family went to stay with an aunt in Ohio. This becomes another mute point as another room catches flame and there’s a crashing noise as an interior wall is weakened and causes my younger brother’s bedroom to fall through into the room below. Or maybe it’s the ground floor living room that falls into the basement. Through the dust, flames, and smoke I can no longer be sure.

There’s no joy in this event. This flight from commitment fills me only with relief. This murderous arsonist standing before you can start a new unencumbered chapter in his life. I’ll visit Saul, the hermit, and tell him what I did, and then perhaps return to Pittsburgh. At least there, I’m familiar with my surroundings and I know I can scavenge plenty of food. When summer arrives, perhaps I’ll go somewhere that I can grow my own food. Maybe I’ll use a patch of Schenley Park.

The smoke in my lungs feels like a fumigation of the body, rather than a choking limitation. This entire time, these past weeks, I feel like I’ve been a sleepwalker, unable to comprehend the horrors around me. I’ve been numb to everything. Now I feel above all of that. My childhood is consumed by flames, as are burdensome perceptions of how I once thought the world worked. I once believed in the old tale: get a job, get a family, stay out of trouble, pay your taxes, and settle for suburban monotony. Now I don’t know what I believe. But now I can decide to believe in whatever I want.

*

My first priority is to find a new form of transportation. There’s a long journey ahead of me, wherever that journey leads.

I stroll away from the burning house in the calmness of that morning. I look back on the continued destruction, despite my desire never to see the home again. Ahead, the snow lies thin on the ground; it feels more delicate than ever. I wonder, if I don’t look back again, will anybody ever see the footprints I make when I leave? I like to think I leave no footprints at all.

Part 3, Chapter 6 (First Half)

2009-07-24T09:38:00.004+01:00

Sorry I'm a bit late again. I started a new job this week and it's left me a drained shell of my former self! Still, here it is; the penultimate update before the start of Part 4.

Don't forget you can buy the whole thing now (revised and updated) for only $1.25, using the links on the right.

I'll upload the second part on Monday.

Enjoy the update,

Dave

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6

It’s early afternoon and I’m on familiar roads; roads I used to cycle along as a child. I remember this bridge and that old crumbling house. Here, on the left, is where they used to hold the summer fair. Now it’s only a damp empty field. There are few houses out here and, consequently, there were always very few people.

Judging by a recently passed church, I must be around ten miles from home. But then the snowmobile’s engine starts to make a loud grinding noise and the machine slows to a walking pace. I curse through my scarf and rock backwards and forward in the vain hope that the motion of my body will propel the piece of crap forwards. Instead, smoke billows out from the engine and it stops altogether. I climb off and look around with annoyance. I’m at a bend in the road. To the left of me, the bank of the road falls down into a small, slow-paced river. The right side leads up to a hill covered with bare-trunked pine trees.

“Fuck you!” I yell the snowmobile and then again at the emptiness around me.

I have no idea how to fix an engine, so I lift my bag onto my back, grab the dirty crowbar in my hand, and start walking.

I count my remaining blessings. The weather has been clear for hours.

Then it snows.

*

I estimate that after fifteen or twenty minutes of walking I’ll have covered a mile. That estimation means I stand to spend at least another three hours outdoors until I arrive at my parent’s place. “Three hours,” I joke bitterly, “may well kill me.” The snow continues to fall and I keep my steady pace through the gathering drifts.

My hands freeze into claw shapes, but I can’t focus on how cold I’m getting, or else it’ll just get worse. I have to put these facts to the back of my mind, into the dark recesses, where I put those other facts like, I am a murderer. The facts aren’t lost. I just push them aside whenever they crop up in thought and replace them with present circumstance or whatever else can catch my attention. I can only do this by maintaining my matter-of-fact, stoic attitude, concerned with practicalities and what I need to do. This works because yesterday’s murder feels so surreal that it could well have been a lifetime ago. I’m a murderer, but when said with stoicism, it could mean as much as, “I once made sandwiches for a living.” I am also agnostic. I am also pro-choice. I also don’t think that matters. “I am a murderer,” only becomes a fact amongst others when I purposefully ignore the consequences and ramifications. Only my bloodied jacket and smeared crowbar make that fact any more real.

*

Three hours is a long time to walk. Three hours is an even longer time to walk when you’re in the snow. This much is obvious.

I’ve wrapped my body from head to foot in scarves, a hat, a jacket, long underwear, and heavy shoes, yet my face still freezes. I can’t feel my toes, despite two pairs of socks trying to retain the heat. The snow gets thicker and thicker as time passes; it sticks to the front of my body in damp clots, and each step I take kicks more snow from the ground.

After an hour of walking, one third of my estimated journey and without spotting any shelter, I feel lightheaded and break into a cold sweat – just like yesterday’s fainting fit in the strange house on the way to Saul’s place. My head spins and my vision blurs. After a few steps, I stumble into the side of the road and fall into a mound of snow, piled high by the wind against the side of a tree.

*

I’ve no idea how long I lay in the snow for, but when I regain consciousness and shuffle to my feet the sun is still high in the sky. I can’t have been here too long. I haven’t turned blue or anything like that. I could have been here for thirty seconds, or five minutes, or twenty minutes. I’ve no idea.

I shudder at the realization of the danger I’m in. Nobody came to help me while I was unconscious. There was nothing to have stopped me from dying in that cold heap, other than my own body’s ability to revive itself. It dawns on me that the pool I’ve been thrown in, this world, where a strange voice yells, “sink or swim,” is deep, so deep, and I could very well keep on sinking if I don’t do something about it. There’s no safety net and nothing, save myself, to pull me back from the brink, should I reach that far. I’m in a new world where catching the flu, and being unable to feed yourself for a while, could very well be your demise. The dizzy spells I’ve experienced take on a new level of severity when I consider the conditions I face. I remind myself, should these lapses continue happening, I may as well be dead next time.

But at this point, right here, all I can do is pick myself up and continue walking. My limbs feel heavy and protest every movement, but to let lethargy win would be certain suicide. And so I just keep walking, pack on my back, cold wind in my face, and walk, and walk, and walk. I don’t resent my situation any more, because there is no way to escape it. I know this journey must end. I must find shelter, company, or something. If I walk for long enough, I’ll find something.

It feels like when you’re stuck on long haul, multiple part journeys. Those connections and waiting times, in anonymous airports, bus stations, and train stations, when there’s nothing you can do to speed up your progress. I recall the utter exhaustion, when I once waited for the time to tick by in the Greyhound station of Cleveland, Ohio, and in the awful town of Niagara, Ontario, with boarded up windows lining the streets, fog in the air, and a dog barking in the distance. The Niagara station closed in the evening and I had to wait outside late into the night, and the neighborhood didn’t look friendly. A long journey like that is a test, but it’s hard to be miserable when you know you can’t improve your situation in the short term. You’re stuck.

And here I am, walking up Highway 79 and then out and down capillaries pointing the way home. I’m in exactly the same situation. There’s nothing I can do except wait out the duration of the walk.

Hours pass and the roads become more familiar. On my left is the home of my childhood friend, Tom Wyndham, and his sister, Holly Wyndham. Holly Wyndham, who I would spy on in my poorly disguised teenage lust; always trying to catch a glimpse of her body. Only once, I saw her in her panties, as she changed clothes. Tom and I would cycle together every day, until he got a car and a driver’s license and our journeys lost their adventurous veneer. While we still cycled, we roamed through the Pennsylvania country. One time we trespassed through a farmer’s field in the early spring, so the juvenile crops were unrecognizable. Spotting our bikes, the mad old farmer ran after us, yelling abuse, waving a shotgun, theatrical. He didn’t catch us, so were fine, but I guess Tom is dead now anyway. As is that old famer. As is Holly Wyndham. It’s not worth stopping at their home. I’m almost back now.

And here is where I would catch the bus to school. Five boys and six girls, every morning through elementary and middle school, waiting in rain and sun for the often-dreaded flash of yellow to come around the far bend. This bus stop indicates that home is only another hundred meters away. I can already see the low roof and fence of my family’s home. I can already see the dark windows where somebody has closed the curtains and blinds. I can already see the snow gathering on the driveway. My father would have never tolerated such a thing.

I approach the front entrance. The car is gone and the house is, by all appearances, empty. I still possess the keys and my numb fingers fumble through my pockets, searching for them. They slip from my grasp, once, twice, as I try to shove them in the lock, and I have to kick away the snow on the doorstep to find them again. Finally, I gain access and once inside I notice that the air is fresh; there’s an open window somewhere. I stroll into the living room and pull open the curtains to light up the drab interior. The room is immaculate, as it always was when I was growing up. There are a few changes here and there, which my parents implemented when my siblings and I began to move away; my parents finally making the place their own again. The kitchen, like the living room, is also spotless. Even the bathrooms smell fresh. I instinctively press the button on the answering machine before I remember there’s no power.

I’m still somehow surprised that I find none of my family in the building, though I knew the place would be empty. All the rooms are clean, and the beds made, as if my family merely left for a holiday.

I go into my old room. Few traces remain of me in here. I moved out three years ago, taking most of my things, and my parents started to use the room for storage. Cardboard boxes sit between my bed and desk, along with piles of books, photos, and CDs. The blue wallpaper reminds me of a former life and a former me where acne was of the upmost importance and I needed a date for whatever it was I did all the time.

I sit on the couch in the living room and contemplate my situation. I take the photos of my friends, family, Emily Jacobs, and Karen Spellman, from my pocket and stand them on the fireplace.

I sit down again.

Now this entire journey seems pointless and impotent. I killed a man so I could sit on this couch in the dimming afternoon. I struggled through hours of wind and cold to be here. A battery-powered clock ticks away in the kitchen. The ticking travels through the door, providing me with a monotony to focus my reality upon. Other than that sound, I’m numb.

Now that I’ve arrived at the end of my journey, fatigue overtakes my body. These few weeks have made me a new man and left me utterly exhausted. But this is the best place to rest; safe and comfortable. There’s no place like home. I sigh, lie back on the welcoming couch and contemplate what to do next. Return to Saul’s home and hope the old hermit will welcome my presence? I can’t call that progress. Return to Pittsburgh, where fifty or sixty disenfranchised men now roam the streets? Perhaps a new group is forming post-Mecca, but I don’t want to be part of any new group, any more than I wanted to be part of the last.

*

Evening encroaches. I find some candles, which my mother stored beneath the kitchen sink, and set a couple down on the coffee table, waiting for a fuller darkness to set in before I light them. Meanwhile, I take one of the candles down to the basement to look for food. I find nothing useful. My family, when they left, took almost everything of use with them. If they were sick, I have no idea why they would leave, or why they would expend the energy to pack up all their vital belongings. If they were healthy, then why didn’t they attempt to contact me? A note on the fridge would have been some consolation.

But I can’t find any clues. My family seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth.

So I poke around the contents of the basement for while. This is one of my favorite parts of the house, because, although it’s always an uncharacteristic mess, most of the space was given over to me, my brothers, and sister, to use to relax with our friends. A filthy pool table stands down there and old Christmas lights hang from the ceiling. A mini fridge houses drinks, and a small stereo sits atop of it. Huge wooden spools, intended to hold industrial amounts of wire, or pipes, or something, left here by previous tenants, act as tables and chairs. Down here, my friends and I had a chance to escape our middle-class lives, and a chance to act out our cool and rebellious fantasies. Now that I’ve returned home, a changed person after over three years of student life, and several weeks of this surreal after-life. I’m embarrassed by the poster of Che Guevara hanging on the wall and the hip-hop CDs stacked by the stereo system. The basement makes me feel childish and ineffectual again.

I snub the candle and return upstairs. Climbing the same basement steps that would creep me out as a kid, because I always thought a hand would shoot up from between the gaps to grab my feet and pull me down.

I return to the living room and pick a tin of preserved ham out of my bag. I eat it cold, sat on the couch and still wrapped in my winter jacket and hat.

Once the living room is too dark to see comfortably, I light the candles again and stand them back on the coffee table, where their dripping wax ruins the veneer. The new source of light causes the living room’s large windows to act as mirrors on the room’s interior. I walk over to them, pulling my hat and scarf off to inspect myself in the dark and flattering reflection. I admire two weeks of beard growth; the longest my facial hair has ever been.

I close the curtains, partly because I’m unnerved by the thought of somebody staring in at me. Then I sit on the couch, with my tin of luncheon ham, and stare at the ceiling for a while.

I fall asleep with a blanket pulled over me and the can still in my hand.

Part 3, Chapter 5

2009-07-19T22:54:00.002+01:00

A short chapter, an interlude really, before the end of Part 3. Sorry it's a bit late in the day -- I've been doing some travelling this weekend.

Also, this week has been the best week yet for book sales, so thanks to everybody who decided to support independent publishing and bought a copy. It's hugely appreciated. If you haven't got your copy yet, they're only $1.25, and available with the links on the right.

Anyway, enjoy the update,

Dave.

--------

5

That morning’s journey is long and uneventful. The sun is out and shining bright, for the most part, but its rays never seem to warm the earth enough. I wonder if the snow will ever leave and if this winter will ever give way to summer. With no sense of time any more, the winter seems to have lasted forever. The previous summer of heaving Oakland traffic and outdoor movies seems like a lifetime away. The crisp Pittsburgh autumn feels like it was of some bygone era. Back with baseball and letterman jackets and corndogs at the drive-in.

I remember last autumn, when Emily and I went on a date to the Phipps botanical gardens, in the heart of Schenley Park. I’d never visited the gardens before so we went on a late evening trip through the amazing panoramas of tropical plants. Fruit kept dropping from the trees and smashing on the ground around us. That evening with Emily was from a time that is now so alien that it may as well never have happened at all. The person I was then may as well be a character from a TV show; they have so little bearing on my life in the present.

I drive the snowmobile down miles and miles of abandoned roads. All I have is time to think.

Part 3, Chapter 4

2009-07-16T22:06:00.002+01:00

Here's Part 3, Chapter 4. It's a short one. I'll post the next chapter on Sunday.

A few people bought copies of the ebook this week, which was awesome, and I'd like to extend my thanks to them -- this week has been the best week for sales so far. So thanks for supporting small publishing! If you haven't picked up a copy yet, they're only $1.25, and have recently been updated with a stack of grammatical fixes, some of the junk cut, and some nice new bits put in. Just check out the links on the right.

I hope you enjoy Part 3, Chapter 4. Sorry it's a bit late in the day -- I've been busy at a family reunion. Enjoy the rest of your week,

Dave

---------

4

At Saul’s, I dream that I’m standing outside the Students’ Union. But, in this dream, the Union building isn’t burnt and gutted. It’s the same as it’s been for years. Busy, with teenagers pouring in and out of its eateries. Behind me, a plaque states that Gene Kelly is a university alumnus. Students stroll by, enjoying the sunshine. Here, one is eating an ice cream. Here, a couple walks hand in hand. Many of them wear pastel clothes, as if I am in a teen movie on an old and faded video cassette.

Someone walks by and I recognize his face. Weeks prior, he had sat on a table across from me in a coffee shop. He called a girl on his cell phone and told her ridiculous stories about his life. He claimed that NASA had offered him a job, and that they would send him a helicopter every morning to bring him into the field to study the latest geological discoveries. The girl hung up on him.

In the dream he only glances at me, grimaces, and walks on.

I look at the Gene Kelly plaque again, glinting in the warm sun, and then turn to use the ATM machine by the Union’s exterior. I put my card in the machine, enter my security number, and listen to the whirr of the mechanism while it thinks and processes. I press more buttons and wait for money and the ATM whirrs some more. The machine dispenses money, but once I pluck it from the slot, I see that I hold pound sterling, rather than dollars. I look around at the students walking by and a queue is forming behind me. I grunt disapproval and put my card into the ATM again. This time the machine whirrs and dispenses fifty Euros in notes illustrated with the Arc de Triumph on one side and Marmeduke comics on the other. I get angry.

This isn’t a nightmare, this is just frustrating. Why doesn’t anything fucking work?...

*

I wake up in a bed, though I fell asleep in an armchair. Saul must have moved me in the night or perhaps I had woken up drunk, climbed into bed.

The copy on Don Quixote sits on the bedside table. Closed.

Light filters down through the window illuminating dust motes in the air.

As I lift my arms out from under the sheets, I realize how cold it is.

I lie under the thick blanket for a while, unwilling to expose myself to the elements, even for the length of time it will take to get dressed. I’m only wearing my boxer shorts and I try to remember if I undressed myself last night. My filthy clothes are folded on a chair in the far corner of the room. I can see blood stains on my jeans even at this distance, though Saul never mentioned it, nor even seemed to notice. Being so blotted with grease and grime, being so dirty, and not showering in so long a time, does in a way, feel more liberating than disgusting. I stink, but nobodies offended. I’d jump in the next lake I see, but the cold would probably kill me.

From the bed, I can see through the window, up into the sky. The clouds are a white and wispy, which makes a change from the oppressive snow clouds that have been overhead for months now. A bird twitters outside.

Eventually, I hear Saul moving in the kitchen, making coffee on an old steel espresso maker, which he places above the coals of the living room’s fireplace, on a small iron frame. “Did you sleep well?” he asks as I walk into the living room, and pull on a sweater.

“Like a rock,” I say. He’s made boiled eggs in a pot over the fire. The smell as he shells them wafts across the room and I feel ravenous.

“I heard you waking, so I put the breakfast on. You’re hungry, right?”

“Absolutely. You read my mind.”

As we eat, Saul asks me what I thought to the opening of Don Quixote. I can’t remember much of the short part I flicked through. Rather than say this, I give vague generalities, and he reads the difficult praises. “It’s a classic,” he laughs. “Give it time. You’ll love it.”

We pass the time, shooting the shit; talking about the weather. Eventually, he asks about my plans. I’m silent for a little while, unwilling to offend his generosity, but I want to leave within the next hour or two.

“Well, I have to go home eventually – I mean go to my parent’s home. I have to see what’s going on and how thing’s stand.”

“There’s no time like the present,” he shrugs.

“That’s true,” I say with relief.

“After breakfast, I’ll get some water. That way, you can get yourself cleaned up. I guess after that there’ll be no reason for you to stick around, right?” It seems that Saul’s hermit instincts have begun to surface again. “I’m interested in what you plan to do, though, after you’ve been back to your old home. Have you figured out your plans? I mean, where are you going in life now?”

I don’t have a clue, but I can’t say that.

“Well, maybe go back to the city. There’s food there, after all.”

“You should go to Florida.” Saul beams with a smile. “I might do it too. All those condos up for grabs now, so you may as well soak up the sun!”

And that sounds like a fantastic idea.

“Maybe I will – why bother staying in this cold?”

Saul’s face crinkles as he looks through the window in quiet thought. Saul’s home is one of those places where what you see beyond it can often take precedent over its interior. “But then, this little place does hold a certain charm,” he says as sparse snowflakes fall against the backdrop of brown and green.

*

Soon afterwards, I pull the tarpaulin from the snowmobile and fire it into life. Saul stands aside, in his doorway, watching with a vague smiling interest. Before I leave, I wave to him and yell “Thanks!” over the sound of the engine. He puts some enthusiasm into his smile and raises his thumb in farewell. I drive away without looking back.

Part 3, Chapter 3 (Second Half)

2009-07-12T19:30:00.002+01:00

Here's the second half of Part 3, Chapter 3.

I hope you're enjoying your weekend. I'm having a super-lazy day, watching TV, and reading a 1970's sci-fi anthology.

I've just uploaded a new edition of A Pittsburgh Storm, with all new grammatical fixes, some junk chopped out, and some good stuff thrown in. It has a new cover too, with a really nice review from Stacey Cochran on there (from howtopublishabook.org).

Pick it up for only $1.25 from the links on the right, and support independent publishing.

Enjoy the post.

Dave

------

3 (Continued)

We drink beer together for several hours. After eating his own dinner, Saul makes up some canned stir-fry vegetables for me and it is, without a doubt, the best meal I’ve eaten in weeks.

Through most of the afternoon, Saul fills me in on his views about literature, and I chip in bits learnt from college. Then Saul recounts his experiences riding on the Trans-Siberian railway in the late nineties, when he was already an old man, rolling across the endless fields of snow. He tells me about growing up in Manhattan in the thirties and forties; what it was like to be a young black man in a big city, who was promised so much but given so little.

We talk, and talk, and the sun sets. It’s too dark outside to continue on the snowmobile and I can hear the wind pick up again. So Saul offers to let me sleep in his spare room. We both knew there was no question about this. There are new rules of hospitality, and they apply as much now as when I met James, and then Hank, and we banded together back then for mutual survival.

Some time later, between beers, he hands me a thick book, its spine wrecked with many readings, and certainly on its third or fourth owner.

“You should read this. Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Take it. It’s a travel story, like yours, about a man on an impossible quest. Again, maybe that’s like yours. It’s full of disaster, which I guess we’ll both face, but through all that, the narrator finds incredible humor. That’s good advice, Matthew. So don’t forget it.”

“Thanks,” is all I say because Saul gets up and leaves the room. I read a few pages while he busies himself in the kitchen.

Eventually, Saul returns to the living room and we drink more.

And soon enough, I fall asleep on the couch.

*

The morning after the Oakland riots, Emily woke up earlier than I did and put the television on to watch the news reports. In the night, she had developed a cough and it unnerved us both, though neither of us mentioned it. From bed, I could hear the TV, as I buried my head into the pillows, relishing the warmth they offered and aware that the rest of the apartment was nowhere near as cozy as that cocoon of blankets and comforters.

Local news had a short segment the Oakland riots and then returned to national and international problems. Of prominence was the U.S.-Mexico border conflict. At that time, Mexico had a much lower infection rate than the U.S. and subsequently many U.S. citizens were attempting to flee there. In an effort to control the situation, the U.S. military sealed the borders, escalating tensions as individuals found themselves in increasingly desperate situations. Violence brewed and breaks in the fence appeared with alarming regularity. The U.S. was losing tens of thousands of citizens over the Mexican border. Both countries regarded this as dangerous.

The broadcast moved to a press conference the President gave the previous evening. “There will soon be a cure,” he said while I curled up beneath the comforter. “It is our number one priority to find this cure,” “researchers are making fantastic progress,” and so on and so on. He mentioned Singapore and Japan. They had the highest infection rates in the world, because of the high density of people and strong trade routes. The news show cut to scenes of chaos around the globe and I pulled the blankets aside to watch the images. It looked like a movie. All of those events and pictures were so removed from my reality. I couldn’t help but distance myself from them, even though they were happening on my own doorstep.

That’s why, as I lay in bed that morning, even though I had evicted an injured woman from my couch the previous night, and Emily was coughing, which spelled nothing but bad news, I felt like I could cope. Even though I had thrown that woman onto the streets as she could barely stand, so destroyed by her illness, and I felt terrible for hours, I awoke with an ease of mind. I should have been shivering in those sheets, rapt in self-loathing, but instead I was too busy listening to the news as a distant observer. All this was too big for me. There was nothing I could do anyway.

Two days earlier, I’d found myself unemployed when the manager of the coffee shop I worked in succumbed to the illness and was forced to close the store. The day before that, I’d watched the Students’ Union belch smoke out of its upper windows as burning paper floated up into the air and glass shattered from the heat of the flames. The fire gutted the entire top four floors and destroyed everything else around. This is how unreal my life had become.

Emily’s cough worsened as the day progressed into the afternoon. She said her stomach hurt and her limbs felt weak, so she went to lie down in bed while I stood leaning on the kitchen counter feeling useless; feeling impotent. How could you defend your home against such a thing? How could you defend against an enemy that could creep up in the night, creep into your cells, and render you utterly defeated without any chance of retaliation? Everyone kept asking that same question. And there were no answers.

I concluded that if Emily was infected then I was too, but this didn’t shock or worry me as much as it should have done. As I said, I far away from the reality of these events. I sat on the couch and stared at the wall, trying to comprehend the ramifications of the situation, but nothing would seem real for a few days yet. By then I would ask why I was the only person not developing any symptoms.

Part 3, Chapter 3 (First Half)

2009-07-09T17:22:00.003+01:00

Here's the first half of Part 3, Chapter 3. It's a pretty long one, but sets the scene for the rest of the book and the eventual climax. I'll post the second half on Sunday.

I'm also currently updating the ebook, with some bonus content that you wont find here. There will be more details to follow, but don't let that put you off getting the ebook today. All previous buyers of the ebook are entitled to free copies of updated versions, and for $1.25, you can't go far wrong. Also, anybody who gets the paperback, gets the ebook for free. Check out the links to the right.

And finally, if you're new here, you should probably start on Chapter 1.

Enjoy your week,

Dave

---------

3

I drive north, along Highway-74, for several more hours.

Around noon, a snowstorm starts. At least I think it’s noon. I can’t be sure, because when I check my watch there’s a crack across the screen and “88:88” flashes on the digital display. The sun is almost overhead.

I maneuver the snowmobile through a valley where a natural wind tunnel has formed. My face soon aches from the cold wind, so I wrap my scarf around my mouth, tighten my jacket, and yank my hat down over my ears.

It’s hard to focus on the big picture as I drive through such torrential conditions. All I do is swear under my breath at each gust and try to avoid any debris on the road. After a while, the anger passes, once I realize how ineffective it is. And fortunately the violence of the wind soon gives way to almost leisurely heaves and pushes. Once the weather slackens, I drive on autopilot, my mind staring into middle-space, thinking vaguely of the past, only a small part of me aware of each abandoned car appearing through the white, and the adjustments necessary to avoid them. I’m so detached and distant from the present I feel like an old man reminiscing on his childhood.

I think back to the games room in the basement of the Uni’s Student Union. I think back to playing pool night after night and getting the highest score on the medieval themed pinball machine. All this when I was a young, single, freshman, living, by chance, in the athlete’s dorm. I made few friends in my housing. Instead, I regularly met with a friend who lived in a dorm down the hill. His dorm was once a psychiatric hospital and the wide hallways, swinging doors, and white walls stood as testament to the building’s past in medicine. As did the tens of mentally disturbed but harmless homeless men living on Forbes Avenue.

I remember being at home with family. A Christmas when I received boxing gloves. A story my father told about pissing on a leprechaun that hid in a bush. Another story about a grizzly bear chasing him up a tree. Another story states we’re related to John F. Kennedy though illicit sexual affairs with an aunt of mine in a famous Dublin hotel.

The snow intensifies once more, buffing and battering. I spot a wooden house by the side of the road and decide to pull in for a while, to shelter from the worst of the elements and regain my senses. I park at the front and shut off the engine. I look down to adjust my coat and when I look up, I see an old man. He steps out from the building’s doorway, calmly raises a long rifle to shoulder height, looks down its sight, and aims it at me.

I freeze.

And he watches me down the gun sight. No expression.

I calculate the odds of me reaching for my gun, taking off the safety, aiming, and firing, before he can do the same. The odds aren’t promising.

I stare at the old man for an eternity. Neither of us move until, by chance, a snowflake hits me in the eye and I recoil in surprise. When I blink away the water, the old man lowers the gun and yells at me, “I guess you’d better come inside. What else do you suppose you’re doing?”

It’s rhetorical, of course, but somehow I yell back, like a child, “I’m going home.”

There’s a long pause while he weights up the situation.

“Well, maybe first, like I said, you should come in from the cold. Get warmed up, huh?”

*

“I’m Saul. It’s good to meet you, Matthew,” the old man says after my own awkward introduction. He shakes my hand and leads me into his home, “This here is my most humble abode.” He raises his arms and turns from side to side, using them to frame the homes interior, as if to establish the space as a piece of cinematic art. Wood and coal are piled high in the fireplace and burn with a pleasant flickering and spark. Several arm chairs and a sofa sit around a coffee table, bathed in the warm glow of the fire. In the next room, through a door, I see a dinner table with a meal of root vegetables for one. But most noticeable of all are the shelves that line every wall, filled with books on every imaginable topic. Books lay all over the coffee table and scattered on the ground. Books prop up the leg of a lop-sided desk, which otherwise houses a now defunct computer. I have never seen this many books outside of a library or bookstore. Books, books, and more books, stuck in every spare nook, piled in dusty stacks everywhere you care to cast your eye.

“I like to read a lot,” Saul informs me with a touch of dry humor. “I’ve been out here, alone, a long time, so I read a lot.”

There’s a long pause. I take stock of the room, basking in its warmth, and the old man continues to speak to me. “I mean, this whole plague business hasn’t touched me much at all. My life has pretty much gone on as it was, except for the electricity getting cut, and the radio, and water, right. I can’t go into the town any more to do my shopping. I was mad when the newspapers stopped being delivered.” Another pause. “Coffee?”

The tone of Saul’s voice is striking erratic, like he’s out of practice with conversation. One line will be mournful, the next, cheerful, like these are only token emotions that fit any particular sentence rather than genuine feelings in themselves

“Yes, please. Coffee would be great,” I respond. As I say this, I break into a sweat, conscious of how many layers of clothes I’m wearing and how comfortable this man’s home is. I peel off some layers while Saul walks into the kitchen and pulls pas from cupboards.

I hang my excess clothes on an armchair to dry, and sit down on a couch in my jeans and t-shirt. This is the warmest that I’ve been in weeks. I untie my shoelaces and pull the shoes from my feet. I scrunch my toes up and it feels fantastic.

“You’re the first person I’ve met in two weeks,” Saul tells me, through the open kitchen door.

“Well, you’re pretty isolated out here, right?”

“Relatively.” He returns to the living room and places a kettle of water over the fire. “A lot of people came out to these parts once the city got too bad, I guess. A lot of them were on the road out there, but most passed by. Only a few came up here to my house.”

Saul’s house sits above the highway and set back about fifteen meters, still very visible, but secluded from the casual passer-by.

“They wanted to come in, of course, and stay the duration of the troubles. ‘Homeless,’ one man said. His house had burnt down. Everybody who left the city was looking for a place to stay, and a few thought this place looked ideal. I’m no charity though. What makes people think they could come and do that? So I soon scared them off.” He nods his head toward the rifle that stands by the door.

“So why did you let me in?”

Saul pauses to think and I regret having asked in case he changes his mind. Instead, he says, as if I should already know, “Because you’re the first person I’ve seen in almost two weeks.”

“It’s already been that long?” I sigh. “I lose track of the days.”

“Yeah, I think so. I think it’s been two weeks. I have a calendar, but I might have missed a few days, so two weeks at the least, unless I crossed too many days off.” The water boils and Saul remains silent as he takes the pot from above the fire, back into the kitchen, to make the coffee. I leaf through a few of the books on the table. They’re all classics. J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Cervantes' Don Quixote.

“You want milk?” Saul yells.

“You have milk?”

“Well, it’s creamer. It’s just as good.”

“Of course. That would be great.”

“Creamer it is.” Saul returns to the living room with two steaming mugs and I shuffle books to make space on the table for them.

I accept my drink with a sincere smile and Saul leans back in an armchair opposite me. He relaxes, closes his eyes for a moment, and sighs. “You gave me a scare back then, when I heard your engine. It’s been so quiet for so long. Even before all this, I would still hear engines passing all through the day. But now, nothing.” He waits, but I don’t know what to say. “So you came from Pittsburgh?”

“Yeah, Oakland.”

“That’s good. I haven’t been there in a long time. Some would call me a recluse, you know. But that’s fair, I guess. I don’t have much of an interest in the world. I mean, I watch the news and all, of course. I keep up to date. I’m not ignorant, but I have no desire to delve in for real. I tried once, but,” he sighs, “well, it didn’t work out.”

I stay silent. I feel uncomfortable around this odd character, so any reply that comes to mind feels forced or irrelevant. I’d be happy talking about his home décor, but instead he gets deep.

“The biggest change for me since this—” he pauses his slow speech to search for an appropriate term “—apocalypse, is that there is no more electricity, I don’t pay rent any more, in fact, my bank doesn’t work any more, and the water keeps freezing in the pipes outside. I’ve not had any news since the TVs and radios stopped. No news, other than those hoards of northbound city folks. They provided me with ample clues concerning the state of the world. I know you’re running away, so things have got pretty bad, right?”

“I’m not running, no,” I insist. I know he wasn’t trying to insult me, but only making an observation. “There’s not much left to run away from. The whole place is wrecked. There’s barely anyone left and, well, no women whatsoever.”

“Sorry?”

“There are no women.”

“No women?”

I elaborate, providing a synopsis of our discovery, the events in Mecca, the unveiling of the transvestite Mistress Sylvia, and my journey north out of Pittsburgh. Saul’s face falls deeper and deeper into itself as the synopsis continues. He tucks his chin into his chest and his brow creases as I retell parts of my story between sips of coffee. I exaggerate certain points and minimize others. I altogether exclude the killing of Hank, of course. I’m in the position of being able to rewrite my entire history, as I wish, and without the danger of any outside contradictions. In this new history, I never saw Hank again after leaving Mecca. There was no gathering pool of deep red blood atop the same crisp white snow that had clouded my vision so completely. There was no crunch and the watermelon thud, watching the crowbar falling through the air to lodge into the rear of a skull, bloodied and oozing…

All of those details are missing from my account, which I otherwise finish with surprising speed. After this, both Saul and I look to the ground, awkward. I’m in a better mood than I expected, having taken a lot off my chest, but Saul’s silence makes me feel uncomfortable. I wish I could read this man.

In my mind, I make terrible generalizations about Saul. Last year, I read an article about sociopaths for a class. The article claimed that as many as one in every twenty people may be a sociopath. That is, they lack any genuine sense of compassion, but mask it so well that they may even convince themselves otherwise. As if there’s a short circuit there, which nobody knows about, and which can make those people uncaring and selfish and unreadable. It struck me as dangerous that so many of these people could inhabit the world around me – that maybe I could even be one. I reminded myself that the only difference between sociopath and psychopath is bloodlust. And I found the safe fear enjoyable, like a good horror movie. My best guesses for sociopaths were company C.E.O.s – the kind of men who have to trample on everybody beneath them for pure material gain – confidence tricksters and, I speculated, war-mongering political leaders, those who managed to climb the slippery pole of politics. Who was it who said that whoever managed to attain the position of president shouldn’t be trusted to do the job? Kurt Vonnegut? If they’re mostly sociopaths, maybe he’s right.

Saul’s strange body language and speech patterns paint him not only as someone who doesn’t know how to react to the emotions of others, but also someone who hasn’t learnt to mask this gap in his knowledge. I already know he’s a hermit, so he doesn’t need to convince other’s of his emotional connection, nor convince himself. Of course, this is a terrible way to think of those around you. Such narrow systems of classification only indicate a narrow-mindedness on ones own part. I tell myself this and try to push these thoughts to the back of my mind.

“No women,” he sighs in disbelief. “Hell.”

I straighten up in the chair and place my mug on the table.

“I’ve been living in this place for thirty-three years now,” he continues. “Can you imagine that? The only times I’ve left have been to get groceries, clothes, books, things like that. There’s been the occasional trip to the bar if I feel too cooped up, and once a year I go to New York to see my brother. Well, and to see his children and now grandchildren. But I grew up in New York – right there in Brooklyn. I’m sure some would wonder how I went from living in the busiest city in the world to being a hermit like this, but I don’t find the transition any stretch of the imagination. That city… I went back there for a visit only three months ago. ‘Like a pot of honey left on the stove,’ I told my brother. ‘The longer it boils the sticker it gets.’ All those people, all those strangers, and every person there seems so afraid. I just don’t know how anybody can deal with all that. I couldn’t, not personally.

“But, like I said, I always wanted kids. That’s why I even went there at all, to see my brother’s grandchildren. Beautiful little things: Molly, Ayden, Michael. My brother’s wife comes from an Irish family. Whenever I visited, I would take them to the park, you know, like old men are supposed to do.” He chuckles to himself.

“But I always wanted kids, I don’t know, to leave a legacy or something. Do you know what I mean? The only reason I didn’t have any is because I couldn’t find the right woman. There were a few women, but they were never the correct fit. Never the right woman for me.”

Saul falls silent for a moment. I wonder why he tells me all this and then I realize, he has nobody left to tell and he may never have this opportunity again. He needs to get a burden off his chest, just as I’d done. He looks down at his large hands with his fingers spread apart. He examines them, as if doing so will help understand this messed up situation.

“And now, I guess, that will never happen,” he says, but without any sadness or regret. Only a statement of fact.

“Yeah,” I say after a pause. Anything else I could say would be pointless, so I remain silent.

“What woman would want to live with an old hermit like me anyway? An old crank?” he says with too much volume and pace. “I don’t think I want a woman around here, or kids knocking into everything and screaming, you know?” He pauses, looks about himself, and resumes in a more comfortable voice. “It’s like, I wanted kids, but in the end, not that bullshit and responsibility that comes with them. That’s a bit misogynist, isn’t it? I want a wife to have the kids and rear them for me and keep out of my face when I want them to and leave me to myself.”

“All the rewards without the responsibility – that sounds like something Kerouac would say.” Surrounded by books, I know we’re both comfortable with literary references.

“Yeah, that’s true. Absolutely the truth.” Saul seems delighted that I’ve brought up literature, perhaps so he can escape from his real dilemma, and a smile spreads across his old, wrinkled face. “You see, Kerouac and co., the Beats in the fifties and sixties, lived a life which offered freedom from work, relationships, and any kind of commitment. It sounds fun, but it was all one sided, because the women were barely allowed any part. Hear me out, I have a point. You see, the Beats were famous for their sexual promiscuity – or at least the willingness to write about it, if not to actually engage in it – and the Beat women, like the men, were expected to be sexually available all the time. But because the men skirted all responsibility – because responsibility would only keep them from their ‘truth’ – the women were left with the aftermath, like bills to pay and children to raise. The women could be ‘beat’, up until they inevitably got pregnant, and then they had to be responsible for both the children and for their respective men. And to top it off, the women who entirely supported these men were relegated to just a few pages or few verses in some token gesture or afterthought. You know, Kerouac reduced a two-year relationship of his into about three pages of Desolation Angels. Imagine that.

“The perfect beat woman, in the eyes of someone like Kerouac, was called the fellaheen. It mean’s ‘peasant woman’ and the idea is that they’re all a bit stupid and vulnerable and angelic in their innocence, so they have to be protected and guided by the men. Doing that that lets a beat man prove his masculinity, which is important in a generation that arrived too late for warfare – beforehand, you see, anybody could prove how much of a man they were by doing a bit of military service. So these women, at the same time as being angels of innocence and vulnerability, were also still supposed to be sexually promiscuous. They call it the angel-prostitute paradox, and it’s impossible, and eventually it drove plenty of beat women crazy. They couldn’t achieve the perfect beat woman. They couldn’t possibly be stupid, submissive, innocent, responsible, kind hearted, and then, above all, sexual, all at once.

“Now the Beats appeared in the fifties, about the same time that Hugh Heffner launched Playboy. That magazine, you could say, was supposed to represent more mainstream views of nineteen-fifty's American youth, and the Beat views are supposed to be the alternative ones, the counterculture. Thing is, when it comes to women the views of Playboy and the views of the Beats are almost identical. Both groups objectify women, use them for sex, and then try to deny any responsibility for them. All that means that maybe Kerouac isn’t such a rebel after all. He was pretty damn mainstream in many ways. It’s no wonder that the next decade brought us modern feminism, with shit like that preceding it.”

“Yeah, I see.”

Through all of this, Saul had found a copy of On the Road and has been flicking through the pages without any specific aim. “So if you say my misogyny sounds like Kerouac, I’d say it’s pretty close to the views of most men. At least at that time and probably to this day. Most men want a legacy, but I’m not sure how many want to stick around and watch it grow. It’s a terrible thing to say.” It is, but I’m not sure I agree with him in the first place.

“What I’m trying to say is that men are fuckers. This beat thing is only one example of how much a bunch of fuckers men are. Men have been fuckers right through history. That’s why so many rulers are men. That’s why history’s only the history of men. Men are fuckers, and I know I’ve certainly been a bit of a fucker. And you probably have, even if you want to deny it. Maybe all this, this whole situation, is just men getting what we deserve. We’re going to live the rest of our lives knowing that this is it; we’re the end; we were fuckers. Maybe it serves us right.”

“Wait, you just said the whole human race will die because we’re possibly misogynists.”

“Well, no, of course I don’t mean that. I meant that this is one facet of a much greater problem. The problem I’m talking about incorporates all that sexual and racial inequality, greed, war mongering, and the whole goddamned environmental nightmare the earth has been facing for years now – just for starters. All those cases of mankind fucking it up. Mankind being real fuckers.”

“So you think this is divine punishment for our sins?”

“No, you don’t understand. Maybe I’m not being clear enough. Maybe I’m clouding the air when I talk about books. The thing is, I don’t think it matters if we’re being punished or not. I’m saying we deserve it.” I nod in uneasy assent. “Besides, I’m not sure something man brought upon himself can be classed as a punishment.”

“G9 was man-made?”

“Well why not? A greedy man somewhere; some hateful scientist. That’s all it would take, right? A scientist in the M.O.D. or F.B.I., or whatever these organizations are called, paid to come up with this new biological weapon and it all gets out of control. Mankind can be vicious, Matthew. And I said about the environmental problem already, didn’t I? Doesn’t that sometimes stand as proof that man doesn’t care about anything else around him, but only cares about himself? He skirted all that responsibility.”

“I think that’s a long-shot.”

“Well, maybe it doesn’t matter any more now anyway. I’m only saying we deserve this, whether we brought it on directly, though the manufacture of such a thing, or whether it’s divine justice, or just coincidence. I remember all the news reports acting mixed up about all that – about where all this came from. I think all that matters now is that at least mankind can’t fuck up any more.”

We sit without speaking for a time. Saul breathes heavily, in, out, in, as if doing so requires a lot of effort.

I break the silence. “Don’t you think that maybe you’re too much of a pessimist when it comes to mankind? Do you honestly think humans are all that bad?” Though I barely know this man, he welcomes the tough questions so readily. “So bad that you cut yourself off like this and have no sympathy for the problem at all?”

“I think…” Saul looks around the room, searching for the words he wants to use. Perhaps he thinks he can pluck them from the thousands of books with which he shares his home. “I only think the possibility that this could be unjust would be too much to bear. I’m not sure I could stand a universe where this was all a cruel chance event.”

I stare at Saul and digest his final argument. I’ll accept the concept that this has been annihilation by design, for a purpose, because the alternative, that this has been a pointless apocalypse, is too cruel to comprehend. But these days, I don’t think I even believe in a God. What god would have left me here?

“Do you want a beer?” Saul asks. “I have some cans chilling in the ice outside.

“You know, that would be great.”

Part 3, Chapter 2 (Second Half)

2009-07-06T11:53:00.003+01:00

Whoa, late post. Sorry about that!

I'll put the next chapter up on Thursday. Enjoy!

Dave

-------

2 (Continued)

But an hour later, I stop again as I approach an old military roadblock. It’s made up of short concrete barricades, backed by several military vehicles, and spread across the width of the road. A couple of weeks ago, the barricades were big news because they meant that the entire city was now under quarantine. It made the city feel like a lost cause, and was emblematic of how out of control the plague had become. Here were these blockades of concrete and steel and guns, trying to fight a plague of microbes and plasma and bits of DNA – no more effective than Emily holding her damp t-shirt to her mouth.

The most notorious roadblocks in the US, or at least those with the highest media appeal, bordered the built up areas of New York and Chicago. Millions of people were trying to escape the hotbeds of disease, which embodied city life, and get out into the country and whatever cities they presumed to be clean. Missoula, Montana, State College in Pennsylvania, and Boulder, Colorado, being prime examples. Of course, all the cities fell. Everywhere fell. After a few weeks, infection rates were so high across the board that nowhere was “clean”.

And anyway, there was no way the authorities could hold back the millions of men, women, and children trying to flee the cities. Before the crowds overran almost all vestiges of authority, people would simply run through the fields to evade the checkpoints. People got crazy and when they hit a roadblock, nothing was going to stand in the way of their own survival. Furthermore, the men holding those roadblocks together were as scared as everybody else. As the hierarchy of authority began to crumble, as even the president got sick and died, it became increasingly difficult to find a way to keep the masses in order.

I remember an image from the front page of one of the last issues of The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. The February 14 edition. In a half-page photograph, an old woman holds her hands up in plea to a masked military officer who tries his best to ignore her. She implores to him, on her knees. He stares over her head, into the distance, impersonal and inhuman; his expressing cracking just enough to convince us otherwise. But the woman’s face utterly crumples in despair. All is lost, the photo says. I’ll never forget that image.

Similar emblematic stories and images emerged from around the world, documenting harsh methods of disease control. In the U.K., authorities opened fire on a crowd of eighteen thousand protestors outside the Houses of Parliament, and then again, on the same day, in Hyde Park. The protest was against the closing of the borders and the subsequent crackdown on all British emigration.

Authorities also closed the U.S.-Mexico and the U.S.-Canada borders. Like in Britain, this wasn’t about controlling the movement of people; this was about halting all movement completely. No immigration. No emigration. No imports. No exports. Nothing. Across the world, almost all countries tightened their borders, to various degrees, and then within the countries themselves, cities too were often sealed. This, of course, was a disaster. No country was self-sufficient. The world was paralyzed.

In the U.S., military personal were stretched between calming public discontent and keeping that very same public quarantined. Soon enough, as the plague’s death toll rose to epic proportions, those checkpoints and barricades became little more than ghosts of authority. Now the old concrete barriers are monoliths to a previous controller; monuments for those gods to whom we almost sacrificed our freedom.

And here I am, poking around this symbolic ground of oppression, as a scavenger, looking for anything of use.

I’m surprised to find a well-stocked weapon’s cabinet in an unlocked, temporary office. I’m even more surprised to find that all I need to unlock the cabinet is a key, which is on the desk in the office next door.

I’ve never held a gun before and now I’m holding a semi-automatic machinegun; big, gray, heavy, cold steel. My experience in videogames provides me with the terminology of weapons. So I know this is a semi-automatic, an MP5 maybe, which is the most prevalent of videogame guns.

I walk to the edge of the road, towards a verge of snow-covered grass, which faces onto scrubland and, beyond that, a rock-face. I aim the gun, pull the trigger, and there’s a click, but nothing more. It appears that digital violence hasn’t taught me well enough. I turn the weapon over in my hands and fiddle with its mechanism for a while, searching for a safety catch. I want to see if there’s ammo inside the clip, but I don’t know how. I feel impotent holding the gun. I’m supposed to feel its power in my hands and equate it to my cock. The archetypal cock: thick, hard, my entire being and source of power. The cock. The gun. “Click.” But nothing happens.

“Click.”

“Click.”

I search around some more and find a switch. I twist it around its axis and settle the weapon again. Then I take aim and pull the trigger.

The force of the shot is so unexpected, it scares the shit out of me. The pellet of metal breaks the sound barrier and the shock travels up through my arm, into my body, so I can feel how tight my feet grip the ground. The power of the gun makes me feel big and in control. I feel powerful, as promised. I shoot more, at a wall, then at a car. I worry that the car might explode if I hit its petrol tank. Then I stop worrying. I’m in charge now, after all, so I shoot the car some more, aiming for the tank now.

The car doesn’t explode, but my whole body feels invigorated.

I pull the trigger again and again. The bang, the flash, the clang of metal against metal. It feels great.

After a while, I stop, control my breathing, and lower the gun. The car is now pocketed with holes and sitting on deflated tires. Paint has chipped off across the length of its body. Windows are smashed and the side mirror hangs by a few wires. What could be oil or gasoline is pooling on the ground beneath the car in a fast spreading dark patch.

I put the safety back on and pull the trigger to check if the gun’s disabled. It clicks its dead sound again so I strap the weapon to my pack along with my other collected miscellany and drive away on the snowmobile, heading north.

Part 3, Chapter 2 (First Half)

2009-07-02T15:00:00.002+01:00

Here's the first half of Chapter 2. I'll post the rest on Sunday. Enjoy the rest of your week,

Dave

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2

The dawn sun shines through the window of this strange living room and eases me from my sleep. First thing: my stomach aches from hunger, so I search the kitchen for food. A Tupperware box sits on the counter. I lift the lid, hopeful, but find moulding mung beans that smell like rotten milk. I open the kitchen window and throw the box, with its disgusting contents, into the garden, for the rats to eat.

In the cupboards, I find canned ravioli and a packet of dried macaroni and cheese. I eat the cold ravioli and watch the light snow fall against the large glass doors by the rear of the building. Pine tree’s stand at the back of the garden, snow covered, with spots of brown poking through. Bird footprints trail through the expansive white.

I palm some more water from the toilet’s cistern tank.

With my morning routine complete, I decide to get moving again. There’s no reason to waste the daylight. I shove the macaroni into my backpack and tie my blanket up.

The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve avoided looking in mirrors. I haven’t seen my face in three days, since Hank and I were in the Southside, and I’m half-scared of what I might find there. I rinse it with water, and tell myself I’ll look later.

As I prepare to leave the home, about to hoist the bag onto my back, I see an acoustic guitar propped by the side of a computer desk. I drop my bag again and sit on the couch with the guitar on my knee. I can only play one part of one song. I think it’s called Cavatina, and it’s the closing music to the movie, The Deer Hunter, which was made a little south of the city. I know the song because my father was a guitarist and used the song as a warm-up exercise. He began learning the instument in his late thirties and he played it every day since with a devotion my mother had never seen him muster before. I remember, while I was in high school, each year through most of the fall and winter I would stay late at school to attend theatre rehearsals. I was Stanley from A Streetcar Named Desire one year and then Iago from Othello the next. When I returned home in the evenings, my father would be back from work and upstairs in his and my mother’s room, carrying out his daily, hour-long practice. I can remember dropping my bag by the stairs and standing in the hall for a minute or so each day to listen. Most of the time, he was playing Cavatina. Slow-fast high notes, the pauses, the refrain, ultimately mournful, but also a celebration of whatever was lost.

Here, in this strange house, I try a few bars of the song, like my father taught me. I last a moment but then I fret the wrong note, and then again a second time, so I give up. I put the guitar, with a certain respect, against the desk where I found it. Cavatina reminds me of returning home, and that’s what I’m supposed to do today.

*

The snowmobile takes a while to start, and the I have to slowly maneuver out of the barricaded street, but after that I’m cruising at a pleasant pace through the city’s outskirts, a clear sky overhead, and a good mood prevailing.

A few miles further out of the city, I pull over at a gas station to salvage a small gas-tank, which I half-fill with fuel siphoned from an old, rusting Chevrolet.

While I’m at the gas station, I decide to look inside the shop. The shelves are bare and the cash register is broken open and emptied of its contents. Through an open door, I see into the storeroom, which looters have ransacked, like everything else. As I move around the shelves, I kick some trash at my feet, and a squirrel appears by the coffee dispenser. It scrambles out through the front of the building, its claws clattering against the tile floor and its tail bouncing through the air.

Whenever I go into these derelict places, be they homes, grocery stores, or gas stations, I feel almost like a detective trying to piece together the last moments of the building’s life, and the lives of its inhabitants. I look for clues, like footprints, broken objects, and points of entry. I look for clues because these buildings feel so unnatural that there must be a mystery somewhere.

Kicking through junk, I walk behind the counter, through the storeroom, and into the manager’s office. I kick a coffee cup aside and it leaks a mould-topped black sludge across scattered printed papers detailing accounts, orders, stock, and so on.

I wish there was somebody I could talk to around here.

Instead, there’s a man’s body sat in an office chair, slouched backwards, head tilted towards me, and eyes open. Maybe a week ago this would have scared me, but I’ve seen enough bodies now. An ashtray with a half-smoked cigarette is on the desk in front of the corpse, next to an empty bottle of expensive looking wine.

Whoever this man is, whoever he was, he didn’t die from the plague. The G9 plague is relatively slow and wilting, and gives an individual the time to get to a bed. Maybe this was a heart attack, a huge seizure, or something else of that severity. Whatever, the final stroke must have been sudden and unexpected. When this happened, there would have been no ambulances to come to this man’s aid. It was quick. He was one of the lucky ones.

A distinct smell of piss hangs in the air, and it’s this, more than anything else, which offends me. Couldn’t this man have been awarded just a little bit of dignity?

Maybe I should bury him. Maybe such an act of respect would save an ounce of my own wicked soul.

But I don’t have a shovel, and I don’t know where to get one out here, so I just leave.

I walk out of the store and strap the old, half-full gasoline tank to the back of the snowmobile. Then I set off again for another few hours of driving on the cold, monotonous, and often crowded, static Highway-74, heading north out of Pittsburgh for what seems like an eternity.

*

But an hour later, I’m forced to stop again as I approach an old military roadblock…

------

If you enjoyed this, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook ($1.25!) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.

Part 3, Chapter 1 (Second Half)

2009-06-28T15:39:00.002+01:00

Here's the second half of Part 3, Chapter 1. Cue weird sex scene!

I'll post Chapter 2 on Thursday, July 2nd.

All the best,

Dave

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1 (Continued)

The sun sets and so I decide to find a place for the night. This task shouldn’t be too difficult and I soon find a particularly promising street.

Upon my approach, I maneuver around the overturned cars at the end of the block. The residents of the street placed them there to act as barricades, though it doesn’t really work. Next to the barricades, hanging from a streetlight, a large plywood sign reads in large black painted letters, “PRIVATE PROPERTY – TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT”. And daubed underneath, the words, “With No Warning!”

I’d seen streets like these on the news broadcasts, when my TV had still been able to receive broadcasts. Communities or work places formed together and barricaded buildings or whole streets from looters, trying to create self-sufficient enclaves similar to Mecca. Of course, these enclaves fell apart as the plague indiscriminately removed members from the ranks. Eventually, nobody was left alive to mount the defense, but by then there were few looters left to defend against and little of value left to take. These days the only things of true value are immediate practicalities: food, fuel, clean water, and firewood. Hopefully, this street’s former life as an enclave will mean there will be something worth finding.

So I crawl the snowmobile along the road. The waving sign unnerves me slightly, but I know nobody will be firing bullets today. By now, everybody who once inhabited this street is either dead or left the city a long time ago. I take in the smashed windows around me, and the random bits of junk in gardens and on the road. Desolation here first, then at a neighbor’s. Then another home ruined. Desperation makes bullets sound in the night, and then, soon enough, in the daytime too. And now there’s nothing but this mess.

I decide to stay at an old square protestant house in the centre of the block. I choose it because it has most of its windows intact and so it should keep the wind, rain, and snow outside for the night, if nothing else. The building is a perfect cube; its length, width, and height the same. I call it a protestant house because my mom called these places protestant houses. I presume this is because protestant’s want things clean and simple. My mom was prone to generalizing.

I pull the snowmobile up by the side of the protestant house and enter through the building’s side door, stepping onto the basement’s stairwell. I have to crack open the door between the basement and the kitchen with the crowbar. When I place the crowbar between the door and the frame, I notice the dried blood on the end of the tool, and then, looking down, the dried blood that spatters my coat. Oh fuck. The dread sinks down through my chest. Dread first and then a racing heart of panic. Do I have blood on my face? Am I literally the walking face of guilt? This is a fucking disaster. I’m crying again.

I take a moment for deep breathing and try to compose myself. I feel light headed. In the toxic mixture of guilt and anxiety, the world begins to sway.

Calm the fuck down, Matt, I tell myself. Relax.

Time passes. I’m moaning, but then as quickly as this started, the panic begins to subside. I look at the crowbar, the blood, and feel nothing once again, except the frown pulling at my face. So I jam the weapon back between the door and the frame, pull it towards my body, and the door flings open upon its hinges.

I move into the kitchen and through home’s lower rooms. The air is stagnant with a strange, but expected, rotting smell. A smell like old damp clothes. I climb the stairwell, past photographs of the six-person family who had once lived here: mom, dad, three sisters, and a brother. Like a negative image of my own family. Then I pass some paintings, all by the same artist. Lilly pads and country homes. Monet, I think.

I find each member of the family in their room and in their respective beds. The last to die was one of the teenage girls. I know this because she lies in a mess of shit-covered sheets, face down in a pillow. Each of the other bodies lie face up and composed in clean, smooth sheets. Obviously, the remaining family members gave dignity to the dead, by laying them down, clean and graceful.

I’m tempted to look through the rooms of the three daughters, as I’d done to Karen Spellman’s room, but guilt overrides these impulses and leaves me feeling nauseous. And then something else makes my stomach churn and I feel weak. My limbs wobble and I break into a sweat. I need to sit down, so I do, right there, on the ground in the upstairs hallway. My head spins. I feel electricity in my brain. The world swims in and out of dizzy focus. I lose my peripheral vision and vaguely feel myself slump sideways to hit the carpet. I’m aware of each coil of fabric pushing against my cheek and I feel the perspiration on the other side of my face turn ice cold. The carpet is so very comfortable, is all I think as the room slips into darkness.

Somewhere, a bird is singing.

The world switches off.

*

When the infected woman, Laura, left the apartment, I locked the hallway door behind her, paused to listen for her fading footsteps, and turned around to look into Emily’s worried face. She held the damp t-shirt in her hand; a talisman for defense from airborne germs. But we knew such a defense wouldn’t work. All we had were gestures because we could find no enemy to fight. Only biology. There was no bad guy. Nobody to take the blame. Nobody to take practical action against. So we created these symbols of defiance, like a scarf or a facemask. They emphasized that we would not die like animals, without a fight, without a care, and that we valued this life over the alternative the virus offered. Even if we could do nothing about it and even if we knew it was already too late and even if we had to evict innocent helpless women from our homes. What did I say about not being an animal?

From the other side of the room, Emily flashed me a weak smile, and I returned one in kind.

I returned to the bed and sat on the edge, my back hunched and my eyes staring to the ground. Emily stayed in the far corner and mirrored my posture. We both knew there was no point in talking. We both felt terrible for what we’d done.

Minutes passed, and Emily moved to my side, stroking her hand through my hair. The grief began to fade into a sore numb point, so she sat down next to me, hugged my side, and finally lay back on the bed, eyes fixed on the ceiling. I wondered if sex would make the situation better or if my previous act would instead consume the moment. I mulled over that question while a dog barked in the street.

I didn’t move for a long time and eventually, understanding my turmoil, she put her hand on my shoulder. I turned to gaze at her, and she pulled me down.

I wondered if, were I with someone else, rather than Emily, would they have allowed this to happen at all? I mean, would they have taken a part in the eviction and helped share the blame? And it made me bitter. I conducted that terrible act alone and so the sex was wasted in an effort to mask the events of that night. If she had shared the responsibility in the first place, we wouldn’t have had to have sex to make up for it, and I wouldn’t have felt so cold towards her. We would have had normal sex, as we normally did – fun sex and satisfying sex. And I knew the resentment was going to bleed over into the next morning.

But in fact, it was all forgotten. The bitterness of that night stayed with that night.

Because the next morning, Emily awoke with a cough that emanated from deep down in her lungs. A million malicious microbes making a new home and preparing to destroy her from the inside out. She’d caught G9.

I didn’t know how my emotions would ever work again.

*

The world swims back into focus. Lights dance in front of my eyes and my limbs feel weak but I manage to sit up and blink away the confusion. Darkness shrouds the hallway, masking everything except the feint edges of objects.

The very first thing I think of is what I did to Hank.

Maybe my mind isn’t as straight as I thought it was. I did lose consciousness after all. I feel sick to my stomach. I keep seeing Hank’s crumpled body in the snow and crowbar in my hand.

I killed a man.

The world swims and blurs again. I feel the movement translate in my stomach and brain. The world swells and pulses, swerves to the left, then right, and left again. The scary part is that I don’t know what’s wrong with me. My face feels heavy and when I try to speak my mouth doesn’t move the way I want it to. All I can utter are guttural vowel sounds. So I have to sit and wait while the world simmers down.

I take a deep breath and tell myself, “Calm down.”

I don’t know how long I sit there but eventually I get to my feet, holding on to the banister to maintain balance. The first thing I notice at this new orientation is how parched my throat feels. I stumble into the bathroom and turn on the faucets at the sink. Nothing happens; the water supply stopped working over a week ago. I turn around and lift the lid of the toilet cistern, which is full of stagnant, ice-cold water. I drink it with my cupped hands and let it run down my neck.

After satisfying the need for water my body screams for more rest, so I stumble down the stairs with an awkward gait and grab my bag from the side of the door. I pull a blanket out and lie down on the couch. It’s a cold night but my eyes are so heavy that I’m sure I won’t feel the chill. I wrap my body further in the couch covers and push my face into the cushions. For a while, darkness becomes absolute.

-------

If you enjoyed this, why not support independent publishing and get the whole book without the wait. Available in paperback and ebook ($1.25!) on Lulu and Smashwords. See the links to the right.

Part 3, Chapter 1 (First Half)

2009-06-25T17:55:00.004+01:00

Well with another murder under our belts, here's the first chapter of Part 3. This is quite a long chapter so I'll break it into two parts again, as few people want an endless ream of text. I'll post the second half on Sunday. I also have a special update planned before then, about the state of free literature. Stay tuned!

Don't forget, if you can't wait for the next part, you can buy the ebook and support independent publishing for only $1.25 by following the links on the right. The ebook is available in just about every format you'll ever need, and a paperback is also available from Lulu.com (with a free ebook, if you email me confirmation of purchase).

If you're new here, this is the thirteenth chapter of A Pittsburgh Storm. It may be best for you to find your feet in the first chapter, over here.

Enjoy!

Dave

---------

Part Three
Bramble, PA

1

I spend most of the afternoon driving through the lower Hill District, then across Downtown, and into Pittsburgh’s Northside. Downtown is a mess, as bad as Oakland and the Southside.

I pass PPG Place; huge glass towers which Hank and I viewed from the roof of an apartment building in the Southside only days ago. We watched as a man pushed desks out of the windows and screamed obscenities into the wind. Now I can see, close up, the office furnishings smashed up and scattered across the road. There’s no sign of the man who did this.

Snow buries the ice rink at the base of the towers, where, every Christmas as a kid, I would visit with my dad, my brothers, and some cousins. The rink would fill with other children, families, teenage kids, and couples on dates, skating in rings, racing, and playing games.

The happy nostalgia that the rink conjures fills me with a tingling warmth and a thin smile, regardless of what I did only an hour ago. I know I should feel terrible and horrified, but I feel nothing; I’m cold to present reality. Only nostalgia and childhood memories seep though the frost. Everything else is mute.

One time, Emily and I came on a date here. We had to queue for an age to get on the ice and my boots were a poor fit, which made my toes go numb, but we loved every minute of our time there. All we did was skate in a loop for a while, race a bit, and fall over. I was so happy, but since all of this upheaval happened, I sometimes ask myself if I really loved Emily. I mean, I’ve barely missed her; she’s hardly been on my mind. I feel like her presence, or lack of, should weigh more heavily on me than it does. Then, when I think back on events like our date at PPG, I’m sure I did love her. I don’t know how I feel anymore.

There’s a whiskey bottle by the side of a corpse on the edge of the rink. I climb off the snowmobile to approach, but find the bottle empty. Next to it, the frozen corpse’s skin has adopted a milky white sheen. Perhaps this is how Hank now looks; it’s been an hour, after all. Then, maybe he didn’t die.

A banner advertisement hangs by one post with one of its ends trailing on the ground and fluttering in the wind. It reads, “ENJOY THE ICE AT PPG”. The movement catches my eye, before I return my attention to the body, sagging in the snow. In this man’s last moments, he decided to drink until he was numb and sit out in the cold to allow the comfort of death to take him from this waking nightmare. And now, here I am, scrutinizing the remains of this person’s most intimate and profound moment, and I reduce their life and loves and achievements to this.

A cold gust of wind wakes me from my daydream and again lifts the banner from the ground. The vinyl claps in aggression. Sheets of paper blow across the rink in their successful bid to escape a defunct office somewhere.

And the snowmobile takes me further north.

*

An unending slideshow of traffic and debris clogs the streets. A burst fire hydrant covers swathes of a sidewalk with sheets of ice and frozen sculptures have formed on the side of a car caught in the spray. Huge jagged teeth and spectacular spires of ice stuck to the metalwork.

I see many more bodies. Anonymous characters in cars or splayed across the sidewalk.

I pass shops, looted long ago. Offices made into makeshift fortresses with barbed wire windows and boarded up doorways. I don’t waste time checking for life.

Then I arrive at the Sixth Street Bridge and squeeze the snowmobile across. The Allegheny River rushes beneath me, swelled by the past few weeks of snowfall, and laboring under its own weight. It carries the occasional abandoned car on its surface, pulling it to the west, with the water black and muddy.

The Northside and the Northern residential districts take another ninety minutes to cross. Inching my way through debris, I take in the desolate homes and businesses that line the streets. My mind wavers in and out of the present, now churning over the events of the day with a detached, distant connection. The unmasking of Mistress Sylvia; the fall of Mecca; the murder I committed only hours ago.

A dog is howling from inside a home. As I drive by the building, I see the animal jump at the living room’s window. It’s a mean looking Rottweiler. As it sees me, it emits a howl of desperation and hate, its teeth gnashing and saliva splattering against the inside of the window. Trapped and desperate. I keep driving.

More time passes, the minutes tick into hours, and I notice that the snowmobile’s fuel gauge is pushing on empty. Furthermore, I’m famished. My throat is dry and bitter. I tilt my head and catch the falling snow on my tongue, but this is a more a gesture, not a practicality.

Before I do anything else, I need to keep the snowmobile running. I doubt I’ll find a fuel stash any time soon, so the only option left is to siphon gas from another vehicle. I know the basics of how to do this because I read about it in a survival book when I was a kid. It was on of those books which tells you how to survive in a rainforest or in the Arctic, how to escape from quicksand, and how to treat a snakebite. All those things that an inquisitive ten-year-old needs to know. I can remember the theory of how to siphon fuel, but I’ve never done it for real.

And on top of that, finding a suitable vehicle proves difficult. This is because news reports often blamed the spread of G9 on the dense conditions that defined city life, and consequently, millions of people fled to the country in a futile bid to outrun the disease. Countless cars filled the roads out of the city, all heading to relatives’ homes, or campgrounds, or wherever else the road could take them. Panicking crowds bought up all of the fuel supplies, legitimately fearing that gasoline would soon be a rare commodity. The problem is that none of these full gas-tanks are in the city any more.

And of those cars that were in the city, looters have already taken most of the fuel and batteries.

While all of this was happening around me, the sheer speed at which the society’s infrastructure fell apart left me in awe. Once a proportion of tanker drivers and long haul truckers fell ill, a vital link in the supply chain was missing. Stores, hospitals, and gas stations all rely on short deliveries – small and frequent – and so, when these finished, everything fell apart. Within days, a third of drivers were without fuel. Subsequently, stores were empty and hospitals ran out of oxygen tanks. The news broadcasts stated that power stations should have had a twenty-day supply of fuel to keep the electricity going and the water pumping. That’s in theory anyway. In reality, we all found ourselves in a lot of trouble, very quickly. There was little water, little gas, little food, little hospital resources, and the ever threatening G9 plague. So everyone who could run, did so. The roads turned chaotic and sluggish. It was a mess, and still is.

I hunt for old cars, which I assume will be easier to siphon. The first rusting heap I find has an empty tank and spits a lungful of sickening gasoline air. But the second car I approach has some has in the tank and I manage to pour a decent amount into an empty bucket found in a snow-filled gutter.

With that success under my belt, I take stock of the food situation. I have a few assorted pieces of food in my bag, and spotting an open diner, I decide to utilize the relative comfort. I choose a stool by the coffee bar. “Service please!” I yell into the back and there’s a clatter of pans in response. A rodent scared by my voice. But things like this no longer make me jumpy.

On the stool, by the bar, I eat my cold meal — an apple and pack of peanut butter pretzels – while admiring a photo of the Sydney Opera House, framed above the coffee machines. To my left, above the cake cabinet, is another framed photograph, this time of a battleship in profile, with guns pointing proudly and radar dish spinning against the setting sun. The image brings to mind of one of the few human-interest stories shown on the news broadcasts before the electricity stopped. Somewhere in the pacific, a U.S. cargo ship was sailing without direction. The crew were healthy, they claimed in a radio broadcast, but feared to return to a potentially dangerous dock. No doubt, some of the crew would have preferred to die with their ill families but the captain had decreed that they would stay at sea for as long as it took to clear things up on land. By now, I suppose, they have all starved. Perhaps they staged a mutiny and docked down in California. Or perhaps they’re still alive, perhaps sat on a desert island eating pineapples in the sun, hoping all this will blow over. Could there be a woman amongst them? I muse on this while eating the pretzels and taking long swigs from my water bottle.

Part 2, Chapter 6 (Second Half)

2009-06-21T19:11:00.003+01:00

Here's the second part of Chapter 6. I'll begin posting Part 3 on Thursday. Enjoy!

Dave

------

6 (Continued)

I walk back along East Carson, towards the Birmingham Bridge. I’ll collect the snowmobile that Hank, James, and I abandoned on the bridge several days ago and I’ll ride it north, back to my parents’ home, in Bramble, Pennsylvania. Maybe, just maybe, there’s somebody still there.

A few other men walk along East Carson: the living dead. I pass them without making eye contact. I don’t bother to guess what they’re planning. A few of them cluster together, in groups of three or four, no doubt heading to old hideouts or other well-kept secrets.

The snow now falls hard, blustering in thick sheets, oppressive and burdensome. This flight feels like both heaven and hell swirled together in a metaphor-burdened marble cake. I’m confused and disorientated, but happy, in a way, to be free.

And ahead, the snow is gathering in virgin plots. A vast plain of white before me; a blank canvas in which to plot my journey to wherever I feel.

Twenty minutes later, I round the corner of East Carson and Brady Street and ascend to the Birmingham Bridge. My hands ache from the cold, so I pull a pair of gloves from my bag and, using my teeth and juggling the crowbar, tug them tight over my fingers.

As I arrive at the top of the shallow incline, I peer across the bridge, over the cars, to where Hank, James, and I had abandoned the snowmobile. A momentary bluster of wind clears the snow from view and ahead I can see a figure. From here, it’s only a shape, but a shape with the same green color as Hank’s ski jacket.

A few minutes later, as I approach Hank, I notice that he’s toying with the snowmobile’s engine. He’s brushed the snow from the vehicle and dropped his collection of things nearby. His hands are covered in oil. With his back to me, unaware of my approach, he swears in frustration, but I don’t catch any words though through the blustering wind.

Above me, the silent black birds have returned. They wheel in the sky, and stare with their beaded eyes as I pass below.

“Hank,” I call. He jumps slightly, and cranes his neck to catch me in the edge of his vision.

“What do you want?”

“I need the snowmobile, Hank. I’m heading up to Bramble.”

“No. No, Matt. I’m sorry.” He turns back to the engine and shouts back a few seconds later, “Leave me alone, Matt. The snowmobile’s mine.”

I watch him tooling with the engine for a while. I find myself thinking of the crowbar in my gloved hand and the reassuring weight of its cold steel.

I need to get the snowmobile and go back to my parents’ place. If they’re home, if anybody’s home, I need to be there.

Nobody has to know what I did and nobody will care.

Only the black birds will see.

Hank turns to look at me again. “You’re still here? What?” He stutters for a moment, trying to find words of adequate force. “Fuck off, Matt. It’s over, so just fuck off.” I see tears welling in his eyes.

And he turns and continues to study the engine.

He tinkers with the mechanism for a while longer, ignoring me, hoping I’ll go away.

But I don’t go away.

Nobody will care.

He reaches over the snowmobile and turns the key in the ignition. There’s a churning noise and he yells triumphantly, “Yes!”

Nobody will see. Even he’s forgotten I’m here. Only the black birds will know.

The weight of the crowbar allows the weapon to swing gracefully through the air. Falling snowflakes fill the space between the hard steel and my staring eyes. The snow looks like a beautiful white noise. A detuned TV. The curved point makes contact with Hank and he caves, crumples, and falls amongst the static. Oil covers his hands and red fills the snow and covers the crowbar, and Hank, and me. I’ve lost peripheral vision. I only exist in this immediate space and this immediate time.

Hank lies to the side and I step around him, strap my backpack to the snowmobile and climb aboard. My hands are numb and my mind is numb. My hands work of their own accord and make the engine rev, loud and sputtering. I look above me and the birds still stare, impartial, perched on trucks and wires, silent. I push them from my mind as the snowmobile turns one-hundred and eighty degrees and moves towards Forbes Avenue. I notice the blood on my coat. I crane my neck and spot Hank in the snow, now only a green clump on the ice, the same green as his snow jacket. A black-green clump becoming a black-green dot, a black-green speck, and then, as I hang left on the snowmobile, there’s nothing at all.

I feel nothing. I’m numb. But then, why are tears running down my face? Where did they come from?

Part 2, Chapter 6 (First Half)

2009-06-18T09:30:00.001+01:00

I know I said I would post the entirety of Chapter 6 today, but the two halves of it are very distinct, it's vitally important to the overall narrative, and it's a fairly long chapter anyway. So I'm posting the first half today, and I'll post the second half on Sunday. As ever, if you're new here, be sure to check out Chapter 1.

Enjoy!

Dave.

--------

6

The men in Mecca have seen so much in the recent weeks that nobody is sure how to react to the disrobing of Sylvia. For many of the men here, most of the discontent in Mecca came from their conviction that this method in such madness could never work, so of course few of us are surprised when the façade of this enclave finally crumbles. Those men who were troubled by the idea of a female in control have nothing left to worry about. All those fears have gone, to be replaced by a void. A void of emotion, I know, that will soon be filled by anger and resentment and whole load of other far worse fears.

Many of the men leave in silence, with the odd snide remark to the side.

“Queer.”

“You fucking bitch.”

I can hear shouting from inside the building. The short man who instigated this trouble sits on the ground and swears to himself before stumbling off with a few allies. Time passes and most of the men fall away from the courtyard with little communication. The edges of my world crumble, yet again. I feel dizzy. How can I face these changes so many times? Will this never end?

Sylvia is weeping, sat on the hard ground, while snow falls into her hair and on her dress, soaking her as it melts and leading her to shiver in discomfort. I can still see her penis, shrunken in the freezing air, through the rip in her dress. Mascara runs down her face etching black rivers of grief.

I stand still in the worsening weather, unsure of which way to turn. I stare at those around me, who vanish into the building or over the fence. I didn’t like the idea of Mecca, but it was something. It was, at least, a vague kind of hope. That’s why I submitted to it, regardless of my feelings. I’m not sure I wanted it taken away with so little warning. Now that this safety net is gone, I find myself exactly where I was a week ago — alone. So I remain immobile in the courtyard.

“Come on,” Timothy says to me. He walks away without checking to see if I follow. I don’t, but I doubt he really cares anymore.

By now, almost everyone has left: the clusters of men previously in conversation; Sylvia’s servants; the cooks. One man remains by the courtyard’s distant fence, on his haunches, rocking backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. Sylvia has pulled herself up onto a low crate where she sits, legs astride, with her genitals now covered by her dress, holding her head in her hands. There appears to be no alternative, so I sit by her side. Maybe I’ll be able to say something profound, like a closing bracket to this whole event. Unfortunately, when it comes to the crunch, I look at her sobbing and sniffing, and find no suitable words.

“All I wanted was to give these men some hope. Was that so wrong?” She says between sobs, “I know I couldn’t do much, but I could make things bearable, right?”

The ethics of her actions are too complex to understand in so short a time, so I state the obvious. “It was a false hope,” is all I say, pathetic and superfluous.

“Of course it was a false hope,” she responds. “What else can there be?” She chokes in a deep breath. “I’ve barely slept during this entire endeavor. I knew they’d find the truth eventually and I’ve expected a lynching or something. But I thought maybe by then I could create something good. Something useful.” Blood drips from her nose into her hand. “I guess I got away lucky,” she splutters.

I’m also crying. I realize I have to leave and go back to what’s left of this desolate world, alone. Then again, now that all hope is dashed, being alone is all I want.

There’s a long pause.

“My hero, you know, is Queen Victoria,” she croaks. “Does that sound lame? I’m sure it does. But you know, Queen Victoria had absolute rulership and she was adored and worshipped for it. She remained unmarried her whole life so she would never have to share her power and we remember to this day — hundreds of years later — how loved she was. And how strong. So confident and sure. Maybe this is the last day she’ll be remembered. If I die, nobody will care about her history.” She pauses, takes another deep sobbing breath, and plunges on. “I didn’t want that absolute power, you know, of course not, but can you see her strength? Against all of those odds. Her womanly force. Can you conceive of it? All men bowed to her. She faced the entire Spanish Armada without batting an eyelid, and she made a legacy, regardless of any family to follow in her footsteps.”

“You wanted to be remembered?”

“For my great legacy.”

“You couldn’t offer a legacy. You could only offer something immediate.”

She shudders in grief and refuses to respond to my criticism.

“You’re insane,” I say, but without enough conviction.

“No. It’s just that nobody understands.”

“I don’t think you understand yourself, Sylvia. You tried to make life bearable, fine, but you only made it all that much more devastating. You’ve shattered all those men, you know that?”

“You were already shattered,” she says as I stand up. Now I’m sure of my plan, what I’m going to do, and where I’m going to go. Sylvia has finally given me direction. “You were already broken,” she spits.

I walk away, into the building, passing into the hallway where men collect their things in a silent frenzy.

*

I climb the stairwell of the now eerie, silent building. The occasional sob carries down a hallway and I hear the odd footfall overhead. There are three men sat in the dining room, ever silent. One of them has his head in his hands, echoing Sylvia’s previous posture. From the stairwell window, I can see Sylvia still outside, her dress torn and her face a mess of grief.

My throat burns.

I go into my makeshift room and find James sat on the bed with an expression of disbelief. Hank’s belongings are gone.

“He picked up and left. It took him, maybe, thirty seconds, and he didn’t say a word.”

The silence between us is too long and too thick. I don’t know how we’ll ever emerge from such a silence, and then we do just that.

“So what are you going to do?” I ask.

James looks up at me. His eyes are red. He shrugs, defeated. “Well, I have to go.” He takes a deep breath, holds it for a few seconds, and exhales, trying to push the stress and anxiety out with the air from his lungs. “I wonder if Ben’s doing ok.”

I stuff my own things into my backpack and then, after a brief hesitation, take the blankets from my bed, rolling them up and fastening them to the bag’s straps. “He’ll be glad to see you. But yeah, none of us can stay, right?” My question sounds rhetorical, but it isn’t.

“No,” he replies anyway, without heart. “No.”

I heave my backpack on and give the room a final glance. James sits with his head down, surrounded by his own belongings. I notice the crowbar I’d brought from Lawrenceville and I grab that too. I never did find a gun.

“Goodbye, James.”

He keeps his head down.

I leave the building. The massive changes occurring around me leave me feeling light headed. Each step down the stairwell is a weight off my shoulders. Yes, the outside world will be hard, but I will only have to look out for myself, think only of my own feelings, and be concerned only for my own health.

Part 2, Chapter 5

2009-06-14T21:07:00.002+01:00

First off, congratulations to the Penguins winning the Stanley Cup.

Here's the penultimate chapter in Part 2. I'll post the final chapter on Thursday, and Part 3 will start next at the end of the week.

Enjoy!

Dave

---------

5

Over the next three days, I settle into a steady routine, hunting for supplies by day and playing poker or backgammon by night. I slowly move away from the friendships of a weary Hank and disillusioned James, and move closer to Timothy, the realist and straight talker. Yesterday, I led a truck up to Lawrenceville to collect James’, Hank’s, and my own possessions. The total that I collected barely filled a corner of the truck and took only twenty minutes for myself and Mitch, my new ever-silent work partner, to gather. Ben, the dog, was nowhere to be seen, but James has remained silent on the subject anyway. We have bigger things to worry about.

We still don’t have electricity in Mecca and the building is still colder than death. Most of the rooms now have propane heaters, but gas is strictly limited to nighttime use.

Right now, my watch reads 13:21 and thirty men congregate in the courtyard eating lunch. Mistress Sylvia sits at a central table, constructed of storage boxes, under one of the plastic shelters. Earlier, she offered a toast, “To the success of Mecca and a return on all our hard work!” Now she’s eating with three men who I can only describe as her servants.

Standing with the group of men with whom I’ve been playing poker for the past few evenings – a group that includes James on the periphery – we eat our barbecued sweet potatoes. Along with four or five other clusters of men, we try to ignore the cold, and satisfy ourselves with the heat of the food as it sits heavy in our stomachs.

Mecca has grown by eleven people over the past three days.

I’ve been in the courtyard for five minutes and the weather is fine. Cold, of course, but everywhere is cold, and the air is still and dry. Aside from the snow on the ground, standing out here is no different from standing inside Mecca: fucking freezing. Accordingly, Mistress Sylvia wears a long red coat with fur along the collar.

Soon enough a light sprinkle of snow falls from the sky and a few of the men laugh as they spot the first ice crystals in the air. In such dire situations, we have to laugh. “More of that great Pittsburgh weather for you!” Sylvia proudly announces and there are more chuckles from the gathered crowd.

In the far corner of the courtyard, her joke gets a poor reception. There’s audible anger and discontent. A short, heavy built man is raising his voice to those around him. He says something. I hear the word “fuck,” and his audience mutters and nods. Then he yells with such unexpected volume that I hop from my chair in surprise. “Fuck this! This is messed up. This just isn’t going to work,” he gestures to the middle of the courtyard, “and especially with this Sylvia running the show.” He says something else, which I miss, and the men around me turn to watch what he may do. Sylvia remains seated, still and calm. We all ask ourselves: where did this come from? “YOU!” the short man yells, and he glares at the back of Sylvia’s head. Slowly, she turns to face her provoker, ice-cold, and he screams, “FUCK YOU!”

Sylvia’s three servants have already risen from their seats in a defensive act but she remains as she was, staring back at him. “If you have a problem with this system,” she says as calm as possible, “then you’re more than welcome to address them with me, like an adult. Not with this cry-baby attitude. Otherwise, of course, you can leave.”

The short man rocks forward on his toes and contemplates moving over to her. He doesn’t. “Well yeah, I have a problem,” he says. The other men around him perch on the precipice of treacherous agreement and the safety of inactivity. But they’re safe, as Sylvia gives her sole attention to the short man and his quick machine-gun of words. “I’ve a problem with you and your whole God-damn shitty Empire. Sitting in your room, issuing orders, pushing us all around, and all the whole time you must fucking love it. Well who died and put you in charge?”

“Who—?” Sylvia pauses and tries to control her reaction. “Who?” She pauses for a long time, and then her exterior cracks, only for a moment, and she screams, red-faced, “EVERYBODY DIED AND PUT ME IN CHARGE!” Her voice is shrill and strained. “You know there’s nothing without me— and— and you know nothing about me!”

The short man rocks forwards again and finally takes a step towards her center table. “Yeah?”

“Hey, back off,” one of the servants shouts, a slim built beard who carries about as much authority as a burrito. From nowhere the short man throws a punch and several others run towards the violence, some to quell it, but more to escalate it, and there’s a sudden and unexpected chaos. I only watch, sure whose side I’m on, but unsure about this method of rebellion. Her three servants fly into the fray, concentrating on the short man, swinging fists at his head. Several times, they make contact, making him stagger backwards into the ranks of his supporters, who grab the servants and pull them into the crowd, punching them and dragging them to the ground.

Sylvia yells, “Stop it!” and tears of frustration run down her face. But before she can have any reasonable effect, the violence reaches her own body. The short angry man grabs her coat, ripping the collar and she emits a choked animal noise.

The sound makes me feel sick.

Sylvia squeezes out of her coat, to escape the choke, and slides onto the ground, to reveal an elegant ball-gown, striking in its beauty and impracticality. The gown's deep blood-red fabric is spotted with the damp falling snow, as she’s pushed out from under the cover of the plastic shelter. Amongst the chaos of fists and grabbing hands her dress is torn. The short man stands over her, grabbing her by her collar, sending fists into her face, blood exploding like fireworks into the air. Other men try to grab him, to make him stop, but he swings at their arms. I expect rape, and though the violence making me feel ill I’m paralyzed. People are grabbing at the short man from all directions, trying to pull him away, quell his sickening violence and then, as quickly as the violence began, the violence ends.

From nowhere, simultaneously across the yard, the violence ends.

Silence falls on the back yard of an old apartment building in the Southside of Pittsburgh where perhaps more men than anywhere else in the world stand gathered in awe. We all stare with ragged breath. Blood drips from various individuals, none more so than Sylvia. All eyes rest on her.

And it transpires, visible to all, that she is really a he and that Mecca is no more.

“The last great civilization falls, huh?” she laughs between globs of blood. Her voice chokes up under the weight of the tears we all feel forming, ready to burst once this shock runs its course.

Part 2, Chapter 4

2009-06-11T23:24:00.004+01:00

Here's chapter 4. Sorry it's a little late in the day -- I know some of you read this at work! I remember I particularly enjoyed writing this chapter. I really liked doing James' monologue near the end. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed reading it. Expect the next chapter on Sunday.

An another note, I learned yesterday that the expansion pack to the XBox's post-apocalyptic video game, Fallout 3, is to be set in Pittsburgh -- which is brilliant because I loved the old Fallout games. But Pittsburgh's no stranger to Zombies and Apocalypses -- George Romero was from the city, and many of his films were made in the area. In fact, Dawn of the Dead was filmed in the Monroeville mall (I've a great photo of myself pretending to be a zombie there), and Left 4 Dead (the video-game) is set in Allegheny county. And here I am perpetuating this great injustice! It seems so unfair, when Pittsburgh was recently voted No.1 place to live in the U.S. by The Economist.

Fallout 3: The Pitt (image from fallout.bethsoft.com)

And finally -- good luck to the Penguins tomorrow.

Dave

-----------

4

In the courtyard that night, five of us gather for poker: myself; Hank; Timothy; a young man named Ivor, with a peach-fuzz moustache; and a bearded man named Don, who waved to me across the courtyard earlier that day. Don wears thick black-framed glasses with tape wrapped around both the nose and arm.

It’s a calm night and, although it’s cold, it’s no warmer indoors, so several other clusters of men lounge around elsewhere in the courtyard. Everybody helps themselves to the various boxes of liquor and beer that have been stacked to one side. There’s a continual patter of laughter in the yard as various groups joke around. We play our games on a table underneath one of newly constructed plastic shelters. The ceilings are transparent and corrugated so that, when I look up, the clouds ripple across the sky. There are no stars visible tonight and the clouds imply we’ll experience more snow or rain before sunrise.

We’re on our fourth hand of Texas Hold ‘Em, which is the only form of poker that we all know, and I’m winning by one-hundred dollars worth of chips, though there’s no money to bet or win. We each have a pseudo fifteen-hundred and the winner will get bragging rights. We pass around joints made from the eighth of weed that I found earlier, when Hank and I searched through old apartment buildings. The etiquette in Mecca means we have to share the weed with the other groups down in the courtyard, so it doesn’t stretch far at all.

I have a Jack of spades and a ten of hearts so I call fifty dollars.

Hank calls my bet and, aware that I’m sitting amongst Mecca skeptics, I mention my earlier discussion with James, who’s currently reading in our room. I’m not sure if telling these men what he said about Sylvia is betraying his confidence or not, but then, since arriving here a day ago, I’m no longer too concerned about James’ trust. We’ve grown apart too much already. I was surprised that he opened up to me today. Our friendship was forced and sudden and it seemed to be crashing at a similar pace. When he told me about his worries, he seemed so far away. I was unable to sympathize or even formulate an adequate response. Instead, I was concerned about my own fragile place under Sylvia’s matriarchy. Right then I felt James was a stranger, and I guess in many ways he was, and still is. When James and I last spoke I was worried about the ramification of treasonous talk, but here, amongst these other strangers, I feel utterly comfortable. I guess that says a lot about the friendship between James and I.

As I recite James’ words to these men, I speak softly so that they all lean closer to listen. We can’t afford to have other people know our opinions. “He says she’s insane,” I finish.

The men look at each other, musing on James’ story. Timothy juts out his jaw, perplexed. In an attempt to look natural to the rest of the courtyard, to look like our conversation isn’t treasonous, he casually throws fifty dollars of chips onto the table.

Igor, with the peach-fuzz moustache, twitches and tries to take the controversy down a notch, though I wish he wouldn’t — I need to talk about these things. “But I think this whole situation’s insane. Don’t you?”

“Yeah,” Hank concurs as the topic slips further and further away from the topic of Sylvia’s fragile mind. “There’s no normality anywhere anymore. Sylvia fits the situation. She’s normal for the situation and that’s how you survive. She has to be nuts to rule over a world gone nuts. Maybe.” He pauses and takes a breath. “There’s no such thing as normality any more.”

“I guess this can feel like normality, in a way,” I say as I fiddle with my Jack and ten, aware that the Sylvia topic is lost – Hank just played it away. Sitting here and playing a game of poker feels perfectly normal.

Tim laughs at me, but it’s not funny, and Igor calls Tim’s fifty dollars.

“You’re just drunk and stoned. You think this is anything like normality?” Tim says in the deep tones of his thick accent. “No way. We’re sat here, six strangers, near enough, playing under a plastic roof in a dead city and a dead country. This ain’t normality, man. There’s a guard with a shotgun at the entrance where we live. This ain’t normality. This attempt at normality is just your security blanket.”

We all remain quiet for a while. We agree with each other, but admitting that would be too difficult. We’re half-happy with the fiction of a security blanket.

Don raises one-hundred dollars.

I call.

Don passes me the stub of a joint, from which I take a deep drag. My head feels light as the cannabis floods my nervous system. I feel like I can’t control my arms the way I’d like to; that they always move a bit too far and a bit too fast and flail about a bit too much. I know that soon I’ll be slouching in my chair and slurring my words ever so slightly and it will feel great to relax, though eventually I’ll take a one drag too much and become sick to my stomach. I take a swig from a beer bottle to erase the burning at the back of my throat.

“I’m not surprised that James said what he did,” Hank says as he calls the one-hundred. “In all honesty, I’m more surprised that more people here aren’t saying the same things. And on top of that I’m surprised to see that so few of us have cracked up at all.” He pauses to think. “But, I mean, barring that event—” he stops. Clearly, people are cracking.

“Yeah, we know man,” adds Tim as he folds from the game. “We should all be fucked up by now. I was seeing guys on those streets totally fucking cracking. Totally insane. Being ripped from normality like this is enough to make anybody crack. We’re all doin’ alright, but how does anyone make sense of that?”

Nobody answers Tim’s question and he creases his eyebrows while he considers the answer himself. There is a call, a check, and the river is dealt. There’s a short silence as we figure out our hands. My cards haven’t worked out, so I bluff and raise one-hundred.

“How long do you guys think you’ll be able to stay here?” Don asks. I’m sure we’ve all been thinking the same question for some time now. We all have our own answers. Hank, Timothy, Ivor, and I, look at each other, judging one another’s reaction to the question.

Rain spatters on the plastic roof and dark, damp spots appear on the asphalt. I watch another group of men stroll towards a second shelter, laughing at a joke. One of their group carries a guitar and settles down with it on his knee to tune it in.

“What else do we have?” Hank asks in a miserable tone. “If this falls apart—”

Silence.

“I think the shit we’re left with when all this falls apart is well understood by all,” says Tim.

Ivor and I nod together.

The rain gets heavier, rattles on the roof and runs down the corrugations to trickle off the sides.

Tim folds when faced with my raise. Ivor laughs and shows his cards, a five and a nine. “This isn’t going anywhere for me,” he smiles.

Don chuckles too. “The money’s yours,” he says to me. “Well done, you bastard.” He throws his cards in.

The guitarist under the next shelter strums a few chords as Ivor shuffles and deals the cards. Then the guitarist picks strings for a while, hums along, and attempts to remember the progression of a song.

*

After two more reckless games, I’m down to three hundred and twenty five dollars. I never claimed to be good at poker. Through the last two games, the rain has intensified. Now, huge sheets of water thunder against the plastic above our heads.

Under the rain, four poker companions and I voice our doubts concerning Mecca. James’ has tired of his reading and has come to the courtyard to sit with us, though he doesn’t play. I feel bad for neglecting to ask him to join the game, but he doesn’t seem to mind. He sits on a crate of canned food and chips in on the conversation every now and then. He’s the most vehement and outspoken detractor of Mistress Sylvia, and he relates to us the day’s events, including his meeting with her, with a particular venom. Unlike the rest of our group, he doesn’t temper the volume of his voice, much to our gathered concern.

“I was down at the rear of the courtyard, there,” he points to a stack of scrap metal and engines, “helping some of the other guys fix a generator, like I said. It’s a piece of junk, but we replaced the broken parts, tightened the gears and fired the thing up. It appeared to work fine, so we hooked it into the mains, and the lights in the building flickered on.” Ivor nods because he remembers the lights. “Cheers were coming from all the windows while the generator is making a huge fucking amount of noise. Then a fan belt snaps, a gear breaks, and that’s it. A day’s work for forty seconds of lighting. Ha! But Mistress Sylvia comes out to congratulate us personally, like she’s the queen or something, visiting her, her, her fucking subjects. It’s supposed to be a morale boost, I guess, because we were all pissed that it didn’t work better. We failed, but she says, ‘it was a big step forward and a step closer to a new civilization.’ Then she tells us that we are the guys who are going to bind Mecca together. That makes sense, sure. Us and the guys who are plumbing, because, she says, we can provide all the modern conveniences. Yeah, that’s all fair enough.

“But then she goes on. She says something like, ‘Mecca will be the promised land. With electricity we’ll contact other groups and there’ll be exponential growth,’ and it all gets a bit weird. She says something like ‘as sovereign mother’ or some shit ‘I will be the glue that holds us all together. Our group will be remembered as the founders of this new and glorious civilization,’ and then she refers to herself as the Earth Mother too and starts going on and on. It’s fucking crazy though. Her head tilted back and her eyes glazed. She says that her men, all of us, will stand by the pleats of her skirt as the pillars of civilization, and all I can think is, ‘What!’ This is all supposed to be a compliment for our hard work, I guess, but it becomes this wild fantasy of hers about her kingdom and her rulership. Only we’re all too weirded out and a bit too scared to say anything.”

We all laugh, nervous and high pitched.

“Ok, the Mecca plan is all a good idea on the practical side. How can you refute it? Without it we have nothing and no hope, but, but she, our ‘mother,’ she’s completely insane. She’s losing it.”

James looks at us, eyes wild, looking for acknowledgement that he’s made a sufficient impact. The rain continues to pour.

I’ve had very few encounters with Mistress Sylvia. In reality, all I know about her Mecca program is that the sharp separation that exists between her followers and her skeptics might be precisely what tears things apart. Unlike any other almost cultish group that may have existed prior to the outbreak of G9, here we have no choice but to play a part. So, some of the men here haven’t been correctly brainwashed yet. Even if we’re free thinkers, we have no choice, for practical reasons, other than to live here and follow her program. And now I realize that any group of men will come to resent the absolute leadership of a woman. We’ll call her insane and mutter rumors; we’ll do anything in an attempt to undermine her leadership, or at least prop up our own masculinity. I’m sure some of these men think Mistress Sylvia should be plain old Sylvia (I certainly do), but some of these men must think she should be nothing more that a breeding slave, reproducing for the sake of humanity. I know some of the men think that.

Resentment is building and a storm will come, regardless of what we may want. Yesterdays’ shooting was precursor to whatever is coming; that much is sure. Something is brewing from deep within this group, something hateful and resentful, and I’m sure that when it erupts nobody will be safe from its wrath.

A storm is most certainly on its way.

The raindrops pound down overhead.

Pittsburgh Images

2009-06-10T00:56:00.005+01:00

Reader, Euan has just been kind enough to send me a cover he recently designed for A Pittsburgh Storm. I absolutely love it. I love the colours, and I love the way it effortlessly portrays the tone and pace of the book.

Thanks Euan!

The image was taken by Mark Knobil, and comes from here. It is licensed Creative Commons.

And while you're checking those images out, I heartily recommend you look at some more of Mark Knobil's Pittsburgh photos. Here are some fantastic ones taken in Polish Hill.

All the best,

Dave

Part 2, Chapter 3 (Continued)

2009-06-07T21:04:00.002+01:00

Here's the second part of Chapter 3. I'll post Chapter 4 on Thursday. Don't forget you can just buy the whole ebook straight away for $1.25, using the links on the side.

Dave

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Back on the street below, we meet with the other members of our salvage team. Six of us climb, with our bags, onto the back of the truck that brought us here, while two more individuals climb into the cabin. As the truck edges through the cluttered streets of Southside, I ask the men around me about their stories — where they’ve come from, what they did, where they’re going. What I want to know is how these men feel about Mistress Sylvia and if they believe that Mecca can deliver on its promises. The problem is that I know that some of these people worship the Mistress and that they may consider my questioning treasonous, so I have to veil my enquiries in innocent conversation. I want to scope out the scale of opinions. I know from the meeting the previous night that there is some discontent, but that many of the men are too scared to voice this. If they get thrown out of Mecca, what do they do then?

Oliver, a thin man from Garfield, answers my prompt with a voice so deep it defies his body’s physical proportions. He tells me how he also saw the fireworks and came to Mecca because of a lack of other options. He admits to a feeling of bewilderment. “Everything seems too ordered at Mecca. It’s all too ordered when everything else around us is in such a mess. Like, it’s just so out of place.” As he says this, he looks around at the others in the truck, and tries to gauge their reactions. He’s said nothing traitorous yet, but he’s on the boundary of doing so. He skillfully invites voices of disagreement into the conversation, to prevent himself from going too far with his criticism.

But before that can happen, a friend of Oliver’s rushes to an unnecessary defense. “We ain’t complaining about the Mecca, you know. Things like Mecca are exactly what we need — we need a woman around. It’s that simple. We were unnerved is all, when we first arrived here.”

Myself, Hank, and an older man in glasses exchange uneasy glances. Most of us have a problem with the Mecca setup. Maybe this is an inherent sexism of ours, instilled by the society that raised us. Maybe this uneasiness is only a culmination of the desperate emotions that stem from the magnitude of bizarre events in the last few weeks. Now we can’t trust anything, so we suspect everything. And we’re always on the very edge of our seats.

The sixth man on the back of the truck, the redhead who directed the salvage operation, flushes annoyance. Initially I can’t tell if he’s expressing anger, unease, or embarrassment, but then he yells at us. “You know, you guys are fucking ungrateful. This is indignant! Mistress Sylvia is the only thing I can see right now that can save us — save us men — and it’s obvious why and it’s pretty fucking rich that you’ll all sit there and disagree.”

“I said that!” Oliver’s friend, a Caribbean man named Timothy, replies with disgust.

The thin man, Oliver, looks down, shamed by the redhead’s shaking stare, and the old man looks to Timothy, urging him to lead our defiant argument.

But the redhead shrugs off Timothy’s reply and resumes his tirade. “When Mistress Sylvia is our only hope, we do whatever the fuck she tells us to do. If that means calling her ‘Mistress’ — and I know that’s what you guys resent — then we fucking do it, else— else what are you doing here? Get out of the Mecca if you don’t like it and give yourself to the fucking dogs. Fuck off into the streets on your own. You’ll get shot down or starve, or if you’re really fucking lucky you’ll die an old man, with nothing, and alone, and that will be it.”

Timothy starts to yell back but stutters and halts. We’re relying on Mistress Sylvia right now. That much is undeniable. Forgive the cliché, but an act of rebellion would be biting the hand that feeds.

The aged man in glasses overcomes his bout of nerves and attempts to calm the situation with his paced and studied tone. “I’m already an old man, now with nothing, ok? So you calm down. Of course these guys are uneasy.” He waves his hand at us and stares the readhead square in the eye. “There’s one woman. One woman hoping to save everybody. And yeah there might be others elsewhere, but right now there’s just one, and she has an army of thirty, forty, maybe fifty men, all doing what she says. There’s nothing wrong with that, I mean nothing wrong with her being in charge, I’m not sexist but,” (but people only ever say I’m not sexist but, or I’m not racist but, before they go ahead and say something sexist, racist, classist or any other -ist you can think of) “this just isn’t right, ok? Having a woman in charge. We’re all uncomfortable, we’re all uneasy, and we’re all, well, outright scared. So relax, will you? We’re not doing anything wrong. We’re all just scared about the future and our place in it. So just relax.”

There’s an awkward pause and then the redhead yells, far too loud and out of place, “No. Maybe you guys need to relax!”

The old man sighs. “Fine, ok,” he says. “Yeah— fine.” He stares out of the truck at the passing buildings, signaling an end to the conversation.

And so we sit in silence for the rest of the journey, watching the desolate, ruined streets roll by. The redhead silently fumes to himself and swears occasionally under his breath. We pass a smashed up antique store, stripped of goods. I’m amazed at the madness that gripped the city while we petered on the precipice of the abyss. I have to wonder at what use people thought they would find for antique Black Panther badges and Royal Dolton bone china tea sets.

*

Ten minutes later, the truck arrives back at Mecca. During our absence, men have cleared snow from the road outside the building, so that the chains on the truck’s wheels clank on the asphalt. Three men stand outside the building to meet our search party, and point to an alleyway where we can offload the supplies we’ve collected.

“Way to go!” one of the men calls as we drive by waving our overloaded bags.

We hand our things down from the back of the truck and proceed through the rear entrance of the building. Mistress Sylvia has stationed a guard at this door. He sits on a high stool, smiling at us, and rests a single-barreled shotgun across his lap. It appears that after yesterday’s bloodshed Mistress Sylvia has reassessed her open door policy.

The redhead walks into Mecca ahead of us, with two other men from the truck’s cab walking by his side. The four skeptics and I follow several yards behind.

“Gentlemen,” the guard says with a pleasant nod.

We pass by and head down the hallway into the courtyard, which is surrounded by the Mecca building on three sides and has a chain-link fence on the final length, bordering a narrow alleyway. Some more men are busy shoveling the snow from the courtyard while others build a collection of open-sided shelters with corrugated plastic roofs.

We dump the remains of our collected supplies in the yard and return indoors. Hank and I are about to walk upstairs, back to the common room, but Timothy grabs my wrist. “We’re having a poker game tonight,” he says, and gestures to another man at the rear of the yard. The man waves towards me on Timothy’s cue and then returns to his building task. “We were thinking you might like to join in. You and your friend of course.”

“That sounds great,” I reply. I’m flattered by Timothy’s open gesture of friendship. I guess that after the argument in the truck, he now knows he’s found allies in this desperate situation. “We’re picking up our things from Lawrenceville tonight,” I tell him, “so we could join in once we get back.”

“Ah, come on. That could take hours. You’re things aren’t going anywhere, so get them tomorrow.”

I agree with him. Hank, James, and I brought all of our essentials with us already. Our Lawrenceville hideout only contains food, books, keepsakes, and other items of no immediate importance. Besides the dog, that is. I tell Timothy that I’ll bring Hank with me, ten-thirty sharp. Ben, the dog, will be fine for one more night and James will just have to suck it up. He’s been acting like a dick lately anyway.

*

I leave Hank in the common room and return to our bedroom to find James sat on the edge of his bed.

“Long time, no see,” I joke, but with too little mirth. “How’s your day been?”

“I’ve been fixing some wiring. Fixing lights. Trying to get a generator to work.” He looks up with heavy eyes. “My dad taught me to do all that shit when I was in high school. It shouldn’t have taken long to do the repairs but the generator we have is fucked up and the guys say they can’t find another. Would you believe how many car batteries were stolen when the trouble broke out? I didn’t even see anyone doing that.”

“Yeah. We found a stash of them today.”

James looks down and I stare at the crown of his head. His hair, like my own, is filthy and matted.

He sighs and gives up on the small talk. “I hate it here, man. This utopia of— of testosterone and muscles and all this fucking useless work. It isn’t my style at all. This all kinda feels sick and futile, to tell the truth.” He drops silent for a split second before he throws me further news. “Oh shit, you know, I spoke to Sylvia today, man. She came to give us a little encouragement speech, but— Jeez, she’s fucking cracked.”

“I—”

“Really, man. She’s seems to think that she’s this, this— holy virgin mother of man or some insane shit. She said she’s ‘redeeming us from damnation’ — her words, not mine. This was after she went on about how pleased she was at the promise of electricity because it’s the first rung on the ladder back to civilization. It’s the next big step. But she reckons she’s the whole fucking deal. A real fucking nutbag. It scared me. It scared me that she seemed so insane in her fantasy and yet she’s running the whole show with all these men under her and they do what she says at the drop of a hat. It’s sick, man. It’s like a king of fascism. I’m scared though, man, and I think I really need to get out of here. But then I know that if I do that I’m fucked anyway.” His speech drops to a whisper. “Alone, dead, and fucked. It’s all the fucking same.”

He’s silent for a long time. I’m at a loss for words. This is all too sudden. Too many things have happened too quickly.

“This is Hell,” he splutters.