Universal Monsters X
“This is very sad,” said Brinkmire. “Very sad. I’m very sad for us. Coming back here, to this place, this may be the most fucked up thing I’ve ever seen. And, as some of you may know, I’ve recently been through a bit of an apocalypse.”
It was hard to argue. We all agreed on that. We agreed that we needed a plan. What divided us was everything else.
Do we stay? The prison has food and drugs and ghosts and its own generator and it smells like death and a few walls are left. Maybe this place is a DMZ after today? Is a DMZ a good thing? What does the “Z” stand for? Do we go? Probably. Where? Is anywhere safe? Is there a sanctuary somewhere and do people with teardrops tattooed beneath their eyes get in?
A few of us made choices. To weep for a while was pretty popular, as was staring into the middle distance like the answer to something was there somewhere, if you could unfocus your eyes just right.
Two of us took suicide as the preferred egress. The rest of us, we thought less of them, but not much. The rest of us, we were a little jealous of their decisiveness. We were a little jealous that they might be sleeping.
The rest of us spent the night at MGD 64 talking ourselves out of shit and watching lights in the distance. Lights from fire-breathing things and lights from things that glowed and, with scant, tacit hope, very occasionally lights from guns. Muzzle blasts and tracer rounds.
We watched every direction for hours. On a clear night in Florida you can see forever. You could see until judgment day, unless that day was yesterday. And with electricity a thing of several hours ago there was no ambient light pollution. Just crisp, matte darkness cut, here and there, by a survivor, like a dangling participle, being struck through by hell’s pen.
Here and there we’d see a car’s headlights and, moments later, we’d see an explosion and then we wouldn’t see the headlights anymore. Sometimes we’d hear a pop and, if it was close enough, a little scream, like a mouse thrown on a stove. Sometimes, if it was close enough, we’d hear Jack Quietly vomit.
A car’s engine and high beams and whatnot, after that Tuesday, that shit is just a dinner bell.
We agreed that our plan probably shouldn’t involve cars.
The bombs had stopped some time ago. With no information anywhere we generally assumed everything that dropped bombs was grounded and destroyed. Either that or everything with wings and piloted by man was in Europe or Asia by now. If there still was an Asia or a Europe. We reckoned there wasn’t a United States, anymore. At first some of us hoped it was just Florida or just the south or just the east coast that died that day, but there was no television or radio from anywhere. It could have been that all the affiliates and relay stations and things were down and that was it, but there were no more bombs. No doubt the military killed as many people as the monsters that day. No doubt more than a few demons were jealous of the way we blanketed the earth with horror and fire and death. But now we missed the bombs. At least it meant someone was still fighting. And, for whatever reason, we liked the idea of dying at the hands of a man way more than at the talons of a beast. Fires, it turns out, aren’t all the same.
No more bombs, we thought, meant no more nation.
Surely if there was a bomber left in the country it would be bombing us. The only other option, we thought, was that in other places shit was even worse, and they needed the bombs and the jets and infantry even more than we did. But the idea that something could be worse than this? We couldn’t wrap ourselves around it. Like trying to divide infinity by zero, we didn’t know how to even begin. All we knew was that we were the remainder.
Or maybe they just ran out of bombs. That thought was the only comfort most of us found that night. The ones who stayed.
As we watched the lights we wondered how many people could have possibly survived. Without weapons and guards and high walls and without Danny Fraction.
At MGD 64 pretty much everyone majored in Comparative Murder, and, still, we were almost erased. Without Fraction our losses would have surely been total. How were psychiatrists and lawyers and weather men and students and architects supposed to walk away?
We laughed about teachers fighting off mummies with chalkboards and sending abominable snow folk to detention and meter maids ticketing Satan just before being decapitated with a “No Parking” sign. We laughed not because we didn’t care they were all dead but because we didn’t know what else to do. We wondered how things went down at fireworks factories and zoos. Which demon drew the kill-the-tigers-and-rhinos card?
And then.
We started to consider firefighters sending demons home with axes and hoses and we thought of coal miners defending their children with picks. We thought about the gangs to which some of us once belonged. We thought about SWAT and SEALs and snipers. We thought of the fathers we collected, about the hard men who taught us to be hard men. We thought about the many, many coffins we had built.
We studied our scars and we remembered. We remembered what they grew over. We remember what we were made of underneath.
Somehow inside this place we forgot what we were. We play-acted and ate teabags and contracted AIDS and we forgot that, once, we were the scariest things we had ever heard of.
Nostalgia washed over us as we remembered how blood tasted off a knife warmed in a liver and how words like, “help” are like laughter, they just sound different when you’re the one that brings it out.
We gathered weapons, whatever was left from when this place still existed. We collected food and we sat in a circle and we asked one another what we regretted even though we all already knew what we regretted most.
“There’s this girl,” Lucian said. And we all agreed that just about every story worth telling could start with, “There’s this girl.”
“I knew her,” he said, “back in LA. She was a dancer. She danced like she was made of flames. She flickered. She smelled like vanilla and wind. Like a vanilla breeze. When I paid her enough she’d smoke cigarettes and tell me stuff. Stuff, like, who she was when she had her clothes on and why she did what she did. She used to tell me that the most important thing in the world to her was knowing for sure that she would die. She said it made everything, everything, seem important and time sensitive. She pressed, always. Every day. It was the difference, she said, in why she could walk but instead she would run. Death was on her heels and he would catch her, she said. But until then she was damn sure going to be alive. I must have asked her out forty times. More. Her skin looked like you could drink it and it would be good for your bones. Not a day’s gone by since I left that I haven’t thought of her. Every day since then. Every single day. I think of her every time I think about living. Living instead of just…I think about her every day. I think about her and I don’t know why I’m not more like that. I don’t know why I’ve always walked when I wasn’t standing still. I think about her a lot and I’ve always regretted that I never held her throat in my hands and watched all that fire leak out of her eyes. I’ve always regretted I never killed her.”
He took a cigarette out of Jack Quietly’s mouth. He took a long drag and he shook his head. “I don’t know if Death ever caught her,” he said, “but I’d sure like to find out.”
Like most important things between men, it went unsaid, but most of us understood, most of us agreed it was as good a reason as any to walk across the country, or maybe run, and kill everything moving.
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With very special thanks to a great friend of mine I don’t speak to nearly enough, and from whom I stole a tiny, fraction-of-a-fraction of a life so that I might create a pursuit of death. I hope this doesn’t piss you off, madam. And I would have asked your permission, but it’s just so much more me to ask for your forgiveness.
