Disclaimer: Not mine.
Summary: The world is blown open. The life you think is safe? It's not. AkuRoku oneshot for Halloween 2010.
Rating: T for adult language and content, glossed gore, and fatalistic thinking.
A/N: Happy Halloween! I wasn't sure if I wanted to write or not for this particular occasion, but not because I don't enjoy Halloween; I do. I love the festivity and the excitement and entertaining the darker side of life. The problem was more logistical: fiction doesn't work the same way film does. I can't have someone jump out of a story and scare you, can't make a loud noise and make you fall out of your seat. It quickly became evident that scary ideas needed to drive the story. Gore has its place, yes, but what about people who aren't unsettled by gore? Gore definitely doesn't disturb me, but a section here had my friend squirming. What, then, is truly scary?
The inspiration came from one of the only things I've read in literature that has actually disturbed me as an idea. Mark Z. Danielewski wrote a book which, at its core, is about a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. A hallway appears one day, and it gets longer and longer, but the outside dimensions of the house don't change. The book is labyrinthine, is chilling, is the most unsettled I've felt in my own home. Blood and gore and demons: they have nothing on this house (if, indeed, it is a house at all). SO! I thought about what scares me and dissected it, took apart a fear until I had the basic ideas driving it: fear of helplessness, fear of the failure of technology, fear of the unknown.
Be safe, have fun, and sleep well.
Of Hell
The condensation on the metal slides over his fingers as the sun beats down on our backs, both of us inclined toward each other, bent over the table and sucking up what is probably the best chocolate malt I've ever had. At $6.75 it had better be, and it usually was, but this time it was a little better, Roxas smiling around his straw, squinting in the glare of the sunlight. I want to reach under the table and hold his hand, which is easily the most homosexual urge I've felt in the entire two and a half weeks we've been sorta-kinda-almost dating. Don't ask me how, after licking in and around his mouth and sucking his dick with a kind of religious fervor, holding hands makes me any gayer than I already am, but it feels that way in my head. Despite this, and despite my inevitable murder at the hands of the hulking slabs of men that are the fathers of all these little kids sucking down malts with us, I reach for his hand anyway. I like him that damn much.
I'd easily be foregoing any of this cheesy Sunday sweet and sugar bullshit, but he's leaving in five hours and thirteen minutes, and his eyes are definitely bluer than any ocean I've ever seen.
"Queer," he says out of the side of his mouth, gets busy sucking up the dregs of our malt. He doesn't shake my hand off, though, and he knows how well reverse psychology works on me.
"You just figure that out?" I'm grinning with what I hope is the proper amount of lecherous charm, but he's just rolling his eyes, making to stand. I know his mom is lurking somewhere in the parking lot, waiting to spirit him away from my evil homosexual clutches, so I nonchalantly lead him to the back of the building and press him up against the grime and grit of the wall. Kissing Roxas is unlike kissing anyone else. Anyone else is teeth and tongue and saliva, but Roxas? Roxas is sliding into a cool pool on a hot day. Roxas is the icy bite of bottled beer on a warm night. Roxas is the best fucking strawberry you've ever had. So, I guess, mouth-watering, but not in a creepy cannibal-vampire-psychopathic way.
Somewhere around the five-minute mark, long after I started hardening in my jeans, he turns his head to the side and eyes the sky.
"I'm late."
"You can't read the sun," I say into his neck, lick a wet stripe up to his ear and let the lobe slide out between my teeth. I can feel the skin raise on his arms, and it makes me physically hurt for the day he comes back from this stupid D.C. trip. I've sucked his dick, but he hasn't sucked mine, and we've definitely done nothing horizontal other than dry hump, and in another two months when I turn eighteen, it'll be technically illegal for me to touch him. Ah, the joys of being a super senior.
"I gotta go, Ax." He slides a hand up under the back of my shirt and I can feel where his fingers count up my spine, memorizing.
"Don't let any presidents get you alone with any cigars," I say into his hair. He fits perfectly in my arms, and this doesn't happen often, just getting to hold him. He's allergic to affection or something, and I know he's only letting me love on him for my benefit. The little bastard.
"Yeah, yeah." He's already walking toward the parking lot, dialing his mom on his cell, when he turns back to me. "If I find out you so much as looked at anyone else while I'm gone, I will cut your dick off myself."
"Scout's honor," I say, offering him a two-fingered salute. He shakes his head at me, and as he's turning I'm seized with the sudden insane desire to profess my undying love for him. We're high school kids, let's not shit ourselves, but the way my heart's rattling around inside my ribcage, I really gotta wonder. Roxas Jacobs, the sexiest sixteen year old in the entirety of San Diego, who would sooner kick your ass in Call of Duty than he would hold your hand under the table of the sappy, nostalgic shakes and malts shop on the beach. I'd just flunked sophomore year, was on my first official cafeteria lunch of my second official year of my second year in high school, when he walked in with a brown paper bag and pulled out what was the beginning of my doom: a bottle of strawberry Yoo-Hoo. I don't even like strawberry milk, but how the fuck are you going to resist a freshman who pulls out the fruitiest fairy drink on the planet his first day of high school? It's been two years and seven months since I sauntered over and talked shit to him for an entire lunch period, but it was already too late for me then, one look at him with his lips on the mouth of that fruity fairy strawberry milk and it was over for me. Love? Yeah, I probably do love him.
I am not a morning person. I will hit the snooze button all eight times before emerging from my warm cave of blankets and still be more asleep than awake as I stumble around my room in the dark, attempting to pull a pair of jeans over my head like a shirt. I've got the alarm set to a rock station, so usually the punchy riffs tear me up from whatever wet dream I'm having, but this morning I'm drifting slowly to the surface as some serious sounding dude drones on and on. I'm able to make out the words "attack" and "state of emergency" before I hit the snooze button. Fucking politics, man, I swear. But five minutes later the same boring dude is droning on about "terrorists" and "evacuations." I'm halfway through convincing myself that this is probably a dream when he says, "Los Angeles, California." I hit the snooze button again, but now I'm unsettled, frowning as I try to wrap the sleep back around me. What about L.A.? It had a terrorist attack? Maybe school would be cancelled. Maybe they're fucking evacuating all of Southern California or some shit. My heart rate shoots up and I'm scrambling out of bed, calling for my brother.
"Reno, California is going to blow up!" I trip over myself and collide with a wall before I make it to the living room, my dad and Reno standing in front of the television.
"Go to school." My dad has a cup of coffee in his hand. He doesn't take his eyes of the screen.
"Seriously? Dad," I say in my best exasperated teenager voice, "the world is like ending and they're just going to send me home anyway."
"Boy, you better get your ass out that door in five minutes." He's looking at me now, blowing on his coffee. Reno, the fucking dick, is smirking at me over his shoulder.
I grumble half-heartedly. My excitement level for telling Roxas what he's missing while he's busy sitting through some boring shit on Capitol Hill is through the actual roof. I pull on some clothes while texting him that, from what my highly-refined skills have gathered, Los Angeles has been attacked by aliens. When there's no answering text, I figure his phone probably has to be off at whatever snooty museum they're visiting. Still, excitement threatens to turn me into a babbling retard. It's on the walk to school that I realize I can't separate excitement at the crazy shit going on from my excitement at just being able to talk to him on the phone.
…I must be getting gayer by the day, I swear.
Whatever lingering excitement I feel as I step on campus slowly evaporates into a chalky dread as I walk toward my locker. People are crying everywhere, the halls silent like I'm on a critical ward at a hospital. You think it's possible to smell dread? Because that's what it smells like—heavy, bitter—like I'm walking through smoke. Sure, most of the entire junior class had gone on the D.C. trip, but still. Did that many people's parents work in L.A.? I'm in the process of pulling out my History book from my locker when I catch a line of conversation.
"…Chicago and New York. I can't believe school's not cancelled."
"Yo," I say, walking up to the kids. "Chicago and New York got hit, too?"
"Bro, you don't watch the news?" It's one of the jocky douches who made it a point to shove Roxas into lockers. He'd have made it a point to do the same to me if I hadn't broken one of his fingers under the bleachers after Roxas had a particularly bruising collision.
"No, bro, I don't. What about Chicago and New York?" After the words leave my mouth, I notice he's been crying.
"They're gone, man. They're all gone." The jock with him is dressed in black, stares blankly at me while I mentally calculate the distance between New York City and Washington D.C., wondering about blast ranges and radiation distance.
"Wow, that's fucking crazy. I wonder if they'll cut the D.C. trip short. I bet the airports are packed. I bet they're on their way back right now." My mouth is moving a hundred miles per hour, hands fisted as that smug fucking bastard who had no fucking issue at all slamming Roxas up against lockers cries. Why is he crying? Why is he crying when his junior girlfriend is on the D.C. trip and they should be fine. Hundreds of miles away from New York, they should be fine. The world tilts suspiciously as the jock shoves me against a row of lockers. It might've hurt if he put any muscle in it, might've hurt if I could still feel my body.
"They're all gone, man. D.C. was the first to go."
You see a lot of tragedy in history books. When you're on your second year of World History like I am, you kinda get used to the idea of wars and dictators and shit like that. Crimes so evil, so totally fucked, that you'd think the devil himself was behind it. I say you "kinda" get used to it, because who ever gets used to the idea of people with a complete and total disregard for human life? I say "kinda" get used to it because an idea in a history book will never, ever prepare you for the depravity humans can be reduced to.
Washington D.C., Los Angeles, New York City, Chicago, and Seattle. That was the first wave, the entire country tearing itself limb from limb. What do you do when your entire governing system is obliterated in five seconds of blinding, retina-searing light? What do you do when millions of people have met Fate on the surface of the sun, a burst of neutronic force that literally turned all living organic matter in a five mile radius into dust. What do you do? You steal a T.V. Hell, you steal everything in the local Best Buy. You steal cars, food, clothes, whole fucking houses. You stare at the news until your eyes glaze over, a cup of coffee gone cold, then putrid, in your hands. You smoke a pack of cigarettes every six hours, quit your job, and sit on the roof with a bottle of Jack, keeping you eyes peeled for the next bomb to drop and blow your whole fucking life open. Or, if you're like me, you wake up every godforsaken morning and go to high school with a bunch of empty shells—cheeks hollowed out, eyes haunted. In history class, there's only four of us left, watching Mr. Collins dutifully draw mushroom clouds on the whiteboard in total silence. If you're like me, you carry around a fucking hole where your heart used to be. If you're like me, even the sun seems a little dark and far, far too cold. I'm trying, I swear to god I'm trying, but it is so, so, so fucking hard.
About a week after the first five went down, while I was washing the dishes in the kitchen since Reno doesn't remember how to do anything but drink and smoke, and my dad…
The first curl of the siren startled me so bad I dropped a plate in the sink, winced as it shattered. I thought it was a car alarm or something, maybe a cop car warning looters, but then it happened again, blasting out over the T.V. dad's been watching for the last fucking month. The sound is ear-splitting, revving up before dying down, over and over the way you imagine a headache must sound. That's when evacuations start flashing across the T.V. screen: Houston, Phoenix, Atlanta, Jacksonville. The next city starts S-A-N, and I feel my mouth go dry, my entire body shaking with fear… and, quietly, hope. Because I miss him, y'know? I miss the way it feels to have him brushing up against me at school. That's why, when the evacuation order finishes F-R-A-N-C-I-S-C-O, I was relieved… and, quietly, devastated. Since the second wave, these tall ivory poles with speakers attached have been going up around the city. The news says state funding, or what remains of it, is setting up an early warning system. 60 minutes—that's all you're given to get as far the fuck away from the center of the city as you can. If you can.
School's even more a joke now than it already was, and I find myself congregating around a group of kids that I wouldn't have even given the time of day to before. Out of a school of about 3,300 there's maybe 50 of us left. Families left the country, moved east, or tried to help with the clean up effort. It's the only thing anyone who stayed in California is really talking about. "Cleaning up" Los Angeles, like it's been a bad kid and needs a talking to. No one's stupid; it's not "clean up" so much as it's "conquer." Whole skyscrapers unclaimed, ripe for the right investor. Except…
"I heard there are bodies everywhere."
"Bullshit. Heard there's just clothes and trash. Buildings are all fine."
"What, a depopulation bomb?" I'm asking, playing with a switchblade. Originally I'd brought it to see if they'd expel me. No one really gave a shit, my English teacher toting a Colt .45 around campus. "That shit is Sci-Fi. It's not real."
"Haven't you been watching the news, Axel?" Kairi, who used to be a sweet girl, one of the flaggies at pep rally, looks like she just got off working the back alley, her lips cotton candy pink, the same color as her sparkling mini skirt. Even with her legs crossed, dozens of bangles and bracelets obscuring her wrists, I can tell she isn't wearing any underwear. "Watch," she says, pulling out her phone.
I want to tell her "no," nausea flooding my mouth at the image of my dad, unmoving in front of the news for weeks straight, but what I'm seeing on her phone freezes the word in my throat. She's got YouTube open, a video of a newscast someone uploaded. The video is grainy, the security black and white of an ATM somewhere in Seattle. The woman is attractive, long hair and light eyes, a nice set of tits as she leans down and punches in her PIN. All of a sudden the screen goes white, the newscaster babbling something I can't understand as a set of filters are applied to the image. I watch the woman wince, her hair blown forward as if caught by the wind… except the right side of her body starts peeling away, her skin pulled by invisible, scorching hands, her body caught in a tempest. Except there is no wind, no heat other than this blinding white light over her shoulder. It happens in an instant, then the replay slows it down—skin giving way to flesh giving way to bone. Her eyes roll up into her skull before they melt down and stream out of the sockets, a thick, frothy spill that reminds me of newly uncorked champagne. It replays again and again, slower and slower as they bring out a scientist who explains particles and fusion and fission and all I can see is Roxas at the Washington Monument being blown into dust as a sun spontaneously manifests right beside him—his body worse than ashes; his body just gone.
Where did he go? My best friend, my boyfriend. Where did he go? His body burnt away by a nuclear bomb so destructive that we don't even know what to call it. All the buildings standing, just perfect piles of clothes and the charred imprint of what was once organic matter, what was once Roxas. I realize I'm asking where the lady at the ATM went, asking over and over like my mind is stuck on a loop, synapses firing and re-firing like she'll suddenly appear if I ask enough, cross my fingers hard enough, disbelieve long enough. Come back, Roxas. Come back.
Kairi shakes her head at me, sad little smile on her cocksucking mouth like she pities me. "They're dead, Axel."
"I heard," Van breathes, cracking his knuckles as he stares at the asphalt in the quad, "that they don't know they're dead." Van's brother, Sora, was on the D.C. trip. "They're walking around, limbs blown off, like zombies."
"Bullshit."
"Heard it on the news," Van says, eyes hard and glittering in the quiet afternoon light. "That's why the clean up crews don't come back. There's nothing to clean up." He bends one of his fingers so far backward that I'm sure it will break. "And if Sora's there, I'm going to bring him back."
"Van," Kairi says, licking her lips. "The crews don't come back because of the radiation." The radiation I had heard of. Get too close to ground zero, and your body gets sick. Get far enough in, even with a hazmat suit, and you never come back. At least that's what I've been hearing. But people are people. We live in America, where anyone will do anything for a buck. Where anyone will move to a ghost city with piles of clothes or rotting zombies or a fine spray of liquefied human mist coating the ground. Where anyone will catalogue and cart off material wealth left behind by a million pounds of human dust, organic vapor. Where anyone will spread a rumor that radiation will kill you if you get too close, just to preserve the goods for themselves.
"He's alive," Van says. He looks quickly over his shoulder like he's checking for something. I don't know why, but something about the way he does it makes the hair on my arms stand up. A familiar, casual glance, like someone's standing behind him. But there's no one there.
"He's dead," Kairi says, and I see the first hint of anger on her pastel candy mouth. I think she and Sora had been dating.
"Dead, alive—what the fuck's it matter?" I ask, getting up from my perch on the stairs. Fifth period started seven minutes ago. "They aren't here." I look Van right in the eyes. "You ever decide to make a trip to D.C., you know where to find me."
"Axel," Kairi warns, her eyes narrowed up at me. Everyone deals with grief in their own way, and I can see the scabs under her bracelets when she runs a hand through her newly short hair.
The remaining classes blur into one another until sixth period when Mr. Collins announces the junior class memorial service the district is holding next Saturday. I press the switchblade into the palm of my hand until blood pools in the center of my desk, Mr. Collins continuing his mushroom cloud illustrations. A memorial service. So that's it. No bodies to recover. The last flicker of hope I'd been holding on to extinguishes between one breath and the next. Blood is the better alternative to the tears I've yet to cry, and the need for closure, for moving on, starts knocking around the place in my chest where Roxas used to fit.
When I get home, Dad's tearing the house apart. "Packing," he calls it. "To Nebraska."
"What's in Nebraska?" I ask, pulling someone's half-eaten sandwich out of the fridge.
"Nothing," dad says, hauling all the coats hanging in the closet into a box with one heaving grab.
"A farm," Reno says, sauntering in along with a cloud of liquor fumes. His good buddy taught P.E. at the high school, was a chaperone on the D.C. trip.
"We bought a fucking farm?"
"You watch your mouth, boy," dad says, pointing a finger at me.
"Well, when are we leaving?" I discreetly spit the half-eaten wad of sandwich into the trash. I'd taken a bite without noticing the mold crawling over the bread.
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow?" I explode, a real panic rising up in me. "We can't! The school's having a funeral next Saturday. I have to," I scramble, my dad's back already turned in the universal I-don't-want-to-hear-it gesture, "say goodbye to—"
"His boyfriend," Reno finishes triumphantly. "Oooh, Rox-ass. I miss you sooo much," he says, mimicking jacking off. It takes every muscle in my body to keep myself from grabbing the bottle of Jack in his hand and beating his fucking face in.
"What?" My dad gets right in my face. "Now I know I didn't raise no fucking faggot." I wince at the word, hate myself for doing it. Roxas doesn't deserve my shame. "You get on in that room and pack up this box, and I don't wanna hear a goddamn world about any goddamn funerals." I stare glassy eyed at the box in his hand. I feel like throwing up. "You hear me, boy?"
"Yes," I manage, eyes lowered. I'm sorry, Roxas.
"Yes, what?"
"Yes, sir."
It's surprisingly difficult to scrape myself from the walls in my room. A couple books, a couple movies, some clothes, but the real issue is all the random shit lying around, odds and ends that I don't know how I accumulated. Some of them, at the very back of the drawers in my desk, remind me so strongly of Roxas that I have to bite my tongue to kill the memory. It's going pretty well until I go to pull the sheets off my bed. Not like I haven't been sleeping here for the last month, but the last time I'd pulled the sheets off, it was because we'd…
Useless trains of thought, and I can hear my dad stampeding around the living room, passing off boxes to Reno so he can shove them on the truck bed. And I'm trying to get these fucking sheets off, but there's Roxas laying there, looking up at me like I'm the center of the universe, one hand stroking at himself as I swallow the anticipation. I remember being nervous, remember thinking that all the porn in the world would never prepare you for sucking a real dick, and now I can feel it in my mouth, feel him in there, his fingers carding through my hair as he disappears past my lips and slides out slick. There's stuff everywhere, but I can't be in this room a second longer. Grabbing the box, I dash out to the truck, choking down memories and bile.
It's a quick, mostly painless affair. I don't have time to carve my name into the back of my door, don't have time to remember to grab one of Roxas' hoodies from where it fell behind the bed. The house I grew up in recedes in the rearview as we round the corner, and I feel like water is streaming out from between my fingers. You can't hold on to the things you think you can; you can't hold on to anything. Reno dials up some obnoxious hillbilly shit that my dad drums along to on the steering wheel as the streets slide past. San Diego used to be full of life, full of color and tanned skin, short skirts and flip flops. Now it is barren, all the color and none of the life, people packing up cars as we take the nearest onramp to the 15. Dad's worried about the 15 taking us within 40 miles of Los Angeles, but the 215 shoots right through Riverside, a city too big to take any chances with. And everything would be fine except what we've been hearing about the radiation. Missing clean up crews, rumors of dead people who don't know they're dead, walking down the road one second and blowing in the wind as dust the next. Step one foot inside the blast range and apparently your skin starts bubbling up and dripping off. If the radiation thing is for real, max radius is supposed to be ten miles. 40 miles should be well out of range, but I can't help but imagine how it feels to have your skin burn up into dust. Can't help but imagine if Roxas felt any pain, if he suffered.
We're just outside the city limits, the sun heavy in the sky, when the sirens go off. The scooping wail sends my stomach to my knees, the truck swerving as my dad jolts. We're suddenly driving much, much faster.
"Shit, shit, shit," Reno's muttering under his breath, the scenery speeding up as my dad lays on the gas pedal. All around us the cars go from 70 miles per hour to nearly 100, the world a terrifying, trembling blur as we speed over the road. We're on an overpass for a split second, and I look out the window: people spilling out of buildings, cars jolting to life and driving with disregard for street signs and the people piled in the streets, screaming and crying and running. More and more cars attempt to merge on the freeway as we tear past, my dad swerving into the next lane to avoid slamming into the back of a tiny accelerating Honda. I turn to make sure the Honda makes it up to speed, and what I see behind us is unbelievable. Cars vying for position on the four lanes of the freeway, cars careening off the sides of the road, dust clouds kicking up as tires pop or cars spin out. It would be comical, almost… if we weren't all running for our lives. My cheeks feel damp after I watch the fifth or six accident in a row, and I turn back around in my seat to stare at the approaching mountain range, 55 minutes to impact.
Nearly an hour of pure adrenaline, and even the passing crackle of static over the radio makes me jump in the back seat. It would be fine if the sirens didn't continue to wail—one long, continuous scream of warning as we push empty. I'm trying to let the sound lull me, to let it batter at me like being thrown around under the surf, but it doesn't work, each fucking wail like icy terror clawing up my veins. Five minutes to impact, I just hope we're far enough away. Four minutes. Three minutes. Two. One. I turn around in my seat, watch the mountain range behind us, cars lined up as far as the eye can see, lights blinking on and off in fury and fear, frustration and hopelessness. There, in the sky, I see a streak of light before I go blind, a flash of white so severe that it actually hurts. The car swerves under us, the road lost in the white. Dad's slamming on the breaks, and I'm shouting, and then the world is upside down. It hurts, and then there is nothing.
Nebraska is simultaneously everything and nothing like I thought it would be. If anyone told me then, nursing a broken arm after the crash and kicking up dust motes in my new room above a fucking barn, that buying a foreclosed farm was a good idea, I'd have laughed into next week. But now? Importing and exporting is at a standstill, our coasts are toxic wastelands, and unless you got the exorbitant cash to cough up at the grocery store—ten bucks a piece for an ear of corn, fifty for the smallest game hen you've ever seen—you're at a farm cutting deals with redneck fucks who have more cows than teeth, more guns than sense. Luckily my dad's got all his teeth. Might not have both arms after the accident when San Diego became a graveyard, but speaking in complete sentences goes a long way when Middle America has become the new cultural melting pot.
In truth, living out here is more like living in a refugee camp, more like a ghetto than an urban center, but there's no more New Yorks and L.A.s to fantasize about moving away to, earning a name in. There's corn to plant and oranges to pick and pigs to feed. There's freeloaders to chase off the back of the property, armed with a chainsaw and a gardening hoe. There are stories about bodies lining the streets, about people eating people when the food runs out. It gets worse the closer you get to either coast, a bunch of lawless psychopaths and the collapse of civilization, except out there, across the Atlantic where people with enough money to pay the ten grand airfare go, the world still turns. Life goes on out there, and I see planes fly across the sky and I think how it could be us if we sell the farm. I think how it could be me if I cut and run. But I think a lot these days, no distractions to keep me occupied. Think a lot about people I used to know. A person I used to know. A year's not long at all. Not long enough.
I know you're supposed to move on, supposed to make new friends or fuck new guys or do something, somewhere, with someone. I can't. Have I tried? Of course I've fucking tried. It's been a year; I'm not a sappy pussy sitting around clutching pictures of my dead boyfriend. I went to a couple bars, the ones that didn't care 18 and a half doesn't equal 21, met a couple guys that called me a faggot, met a couple that didn't. It's like something's broken inside me, the part of the machine that wants to know other people that aren't Roxas. Like something in me was tied to him, and it doesn't know it's dead, either. I wish it'd stop feeling good when I get between the sheets and think about his mouth. Wish it'd stop feeling good to say his name while I jack off. Feels good in my mouth, feels safe there. It'll probably get me into trouble one of these days, strung up and dragged along behind a tractor or whatever redneck shit people get down with out here. You'd think the end of our world as we know it would kick racism in the nuts, but it didn't. Racists, rapists, meth labs, whorehouses—other counties call what happened here a "spiritual cleansing." Funny how it seems like only the worst sonsofbitches to ever walk on U.S. soil are the only ones left.
As the days go by, as people get hungrier, we get more and more people out this way. Lined up down the road, trading my dad clothes for corn, medicine for meat. It's like running a dirty operation, Reno standing around with a bat while I chase off thieves in the back. It's easier acting tough on the farm, tearing down rows of green beans with a chainsaw, a couple skinny bastards dropping carrots and cabbage all over the place, pockets bulging. It's not as easy on the streets, heading to the post office for mail that never comes but my dad insists I check, trying to get a beer at a bar where everyone knows my dad's first name and knows I'm the kid with the chainsaw. I've been jumped about twenty times in the last year. A couple douchebags tried shoving me in the back of a van like they thought they could ransom me for money from my dad. Might've worked if we actually had money. Might've worked if I didn't break one's jaw and another's finger before they let me go. The smart thing probably would've been to let go without too much of a struggle. Instead, I fucked them up, so now when people come for me, it's huge, meathead guys armed with taunts and probably knives. I have to watch my back: not only am I a faggot; I'm a faggot on a farm.
These are pretty easy times to feel paranoid, so I try not to trip myself out too hard, but I can't shake this feeling of being followed. Earlier today, walking back to the house after heading to the side of the road to pick up the paper, I had the unmistakable feeling that I was being followed. I'd shake it off, but it happens a lot these days. Maybe someone saw me hit on a guy at a bar? Maybe some hungry psychopath thinks I walk around with roasted chicken in my pants? I tell myself that everyone's freaked out, worried that more bombs are coming no matter how many months we've gone without any, worried that the sirens are going to scream to life, worried that the cities… all those cities…
I just don't know if I'm being too paranoid, or if there actually are people waiting to fuck with me, lurking just in the shadows. And everything would be fine, I've started carrying around a gun, except… sometimes I get that feeling when I know I'm alone. In the kitchen making breakfast, the feeling that someone's standing just behind me. And you know this feeling, can almost hear the person's breath, can almost feel their proximity against your back. The way you know someone's reading over your shoulder, the way you keep looking back when you're walking down a road alone. Why does it feel like someone's watching me brush my teeth, like, if I look up into the mirror over the sink, I'll see someone standing there? No one ever is, and I'm beginning to think I'm losing my mind. Maybe I want someone to be there, want someone to talk to, to be with. I'm just so tired of being alone. Tired of missing a memory.
I'm walking back from the market on South when it happens again, that feeling someone's behind me. This time I know the paranoia is founded: I just dropped off a huge order, and I have a lot of money on me. If someone knows Friday's meat day, then I'm an easy target. A couple nonchalant glances behind me, nice and easy like I'm looking at something on my shoulder, yield nothing, just lengthening shadows as the sun begins to hasten its descent. The fuckers could be anywhere, so I quicken my pace. I'm just about to head out of town, on the road back to the house, when I look again. Nothing except a family sitting at one of the streetside cafés. If there's potential life-threatening kidnappers, they're all hiding behind storefronts. I'm about to head out of town when I pause and look back at the family at the café. The father, meaty fists squeezing a sandwich to his mouth, I recognize as the guy who grows tobacco. People pay an arm and a leg for a couple slices of ham, and this guy's got them handing out their newborns for a couple rolled cigarettes. It explains why they're able to afford café food, the small girl gnawing on a corndog, and the boy—
My blood freezes in my veins, limbs suddenly locking in place. The boy, a small blonde with a toy firetruck in one hand, has a bottle of YooHoo strawberry milk in the other. Immediately I'm turning around and around, whispering his name. Roxas, Roxas, Roxas. It's gotta be Roxas. It's him, I know it's him. I don't believe in ghosts or Fate or God, but this is him. Standing over my bed in the middle of the night, I knew it wasn't a ghost or someone waiting to suffocate me in my sleep. It's Roxas… right? Maybe he's a ghost, or… I don't know. But this is a sign, has to be a sign. Maybe. Hopefully. I'm running back toward the house before I've fully registered what's happening. There's something I have to check, the memory of someone looking over his shoulder at something that wasn't there… or was there?
I haven't used the Internet in months, trying a couple times unsuccessfully to log in to my Facebook. When I finally manage to get in, I'm hoping against hope that I wasn't the only one in Oceanside High to make it out alive. Just the day before San Diego became a place we talk about in the past tense, we'd been sitting in the quad. Me, Kairi, and…
"Vanitas," I whisper under my breath, scrolling through my friends. I catch a picture of Kairi, one of that tool Riku—both look fairly recent, their faces older than I remember, so I know they made it out alive. Van's link pops up and I click and cross my fingers. I scan his profile quickly, panic rising. Nothing new for months. Months and months of messages from other people, asking where he is, some wishing him a happy birthday. Last update from him… definitely after the attack, about three months. I gnaw at a nail, bite and chew and worry it over and over in my mouth. He got out alive, but he's been off the grid for the last seven months. Where the fuck could heBREAKoh. I glance over my shoulder again, a chill pricking across the back of my neck. He said he'd bring Sora back. Looking over his shoulder, looking at something that wasn't there, he said his brother was alive. He didn't wonder, he didn't ask. The way he said it, eyes certain, he knew.
Reno's keys are in my hand before I'm even conscious of making the decision. If Roxas is in D.C., zombie or dust or a pile of fucking clothes, I'm going to find him. Just to say goodbye, or just to sit for a while. I just know I can't feel like this anymore, waiting for a touch that's never gunna come.
They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but I've gotta tell you: the road to hell is paved with asphalt like any other. Cracked and faded, but still asphalt. There's bodies here and there, a couple burning cars that scare me more than if people with flamethrowers were standing in the road, but no good intentions, definitely none of those. I have to modify the route, skewing wide from bigger cities, and about ten hours in it becomes clear that I'm going to have to sleep at some point, and I don't think anyone working a gas station would take too kindly to me parking and passing out. I'd try pulling off the road, but that's like hanging up a sign that says, "Come Fuck With Me." Instead, I drive off the road and into what looks like a field. I kill the lights, lock the doors, and pass out.
The split-second awareness before you open your eyes, light on your face and the ache of sleeping somewhere that isn't a bed, and I get the feeling again. It's the same feeling that I've woken up to at home, feeling someone standing just to my left, but when I open my eyes, there's no one there. Despite knowing this, having the muscle memory taut in my body, it's still a struggle to open my eyes. There's always that hesitation: what if? What if I'm not alone, what if it's some sick fucking bastard waiting to make sure he can watch my eyes as I die. I suck in a breath and clench my fists, squinting as my eyes adjust to the light.
I guess, sometimes, paranoia really pays off.
There's a group of people standing around the car, clothes tattered and skin covered in grime. There's a word for people that look like this, but the only one that comes to mind is "insane." They look crazy, actually padded-cell, tearing-their-hair-out crazy. I reach for the keys in the ignition as one of them laughs at me, his teeth browned rot in his mouth. The car turns over just as one of them cocks a shotgun in my rearview, another shattering one of the windows in the backseat with what looks like a fucking scythe. The one with rotted teeth, licking at them like he wants to have me for breakfast, is standing in front of the car. I don't have time to ask for forgiveness—I plow that motherfucker down and tear out of there, back to the road. Why people with guns never aim for the tires, I'll never know. A shotgun shell comes tearing through the passenger seat, so I start weaving, another bullet shattering my side view mirror. I could probably do with another gas stop, but I'm not taking it under 80 mph until I'm far the fuck away from West Virginia.
As I approach D.C., there's still no good intentions, but there's an awful lot of dead people. At one point I have to drive over the bodies of what looks like schoolchildren, their hands linked. They're dead, just brittle bones and small clothes, but it hurts me to do it. Driving through smaller towns is the worst. They look deserted, but I can't help but feel eyes on me just inside buildings, watching me go to the edge of the world. Stopping for gas proves to be a dramatic affair. I stop at a place in a town that looks entirely deserted, settle the pump into my tank, and when I turn there's a gun leveled between my eyes.
"Gas ain't free," he says, and I can tell from the way his hands don't shake that he'll kill me in a heartbeat.
"Sure," I breathe, patting one of my pockets. "I have some money in here." I try to keep the relief in my exhale to a minimum as he lowers the gun, safety still off, and reaches into my pocket. It gives me some idea about how it must be to live this close to a ground zero when he takes a small amount of money as opposed to taking it all. He didn't have the gun because he was power tripping; he had it for protection. The idea is unsettling, and I nod my thanks, hopping back in the car. I fiddle with radio as he recedes in my rearview, watching me drive toward a killing ground, but there's nothing on. The radio is static here; no broadcasts, no news. As I press on, the only thing I can hope for is that the sirens still work, towering intermittently along the road the entire drive.
The feeling of someone behind me neither increases nor decreases the entire trip, but remains a chilling constant. I half expect to meet a pair of eyes when I glance at the backseat in the rearview, the feeling is that tangible. Soon the trees grows sparse, the green of the world giving way to browns and grays. The Washington Monument is visible from here, stabbing upward into the sky like something proud, like something defiant. My skin starts to itch, scalp prickling, and there, in the distance, is a figure standing in the road. I'd be half inclined to think it's just a mannequin, a scarecrow meant to warn travelers that beyond it lays the 10 mile radius to ground zero, except that feeling of being watched, of being followed… it's not coming from behind me anymore. It's coming from right there, from right in front of me.
I slow the car's approach, and as I get closer, I can tell it's him. Without a doubt, the same clothes, the same angle to his hair. I can't believe he still looks the same, my mouth smiling so wide that my cheeks burn. I want to drive as fast as fucking possible, want to brake at the last second and dive out of the car and grab him into my arms and just hold him again, the way he feels against me, but I have to do this right, cautiously. Have to make sure I don't start melting away. As it is, my skin is reddening, as if I'm under the midday sun at one of the tropics, burning up. I try to keep my mind off of what's happening to my body by focusing on how perfect he looks from here. It's almost too good to be true…
…which, as I get within throwing distance, I find out actually is. As the distance between us closes, it's like the illusion melts away. The sweep of his hair, the set of his clothes against his shoulders—it's all gone, just dust and charred flesh. How I can tell it's him under the burnt blood and matted hair, I don't know. I just know the body standing in the road is Roxas, seared and severed skin and the only person I know how to love.
I park and attempt to go to him, but he holds a hand out. Past a certain point, his hand disappears in mid-air. That, I understand, must be the line between where it's safe and where it's not. My skin is already peeling off me, my vision blurring. What the fuck am I doing here with this burned out shell of a boy? What am I doing here, burning up to touch the sun? I fall to my knees and want to cry, but Roxas hops a little, seems excited as he beckons to me. I want to crack a joke at how he looks, but nothing comes to me, torn between outrageous joy and abject horror. This must be how it is to see survivors of war, how they look blown apart and anything but human.
"Roxas," I rasp, licking my bubbling lips. He nods at me and opens his mouth. What happens next halts my breath, heart trembling in my chest. He goes to say something to me, but when he speaks, all I hear is the sounds of people screaming. Not just him screaming, but hundreds of people screaming like they're being pulled apart. There's no other way to describe the sound other than to call it frightening. Every part of you that feels terror, that fears death—it recoils at the sound of that, phantom pain pricking all over my body. Ashes tumble out of his mouth, and I see something burning at the back of his throat, a small inferno.
"Roxas," I choke, reaching out to him. The tips of my fingers throb in agony, but Roxas, or what used to be Roxas, nods, beckoning. The wave of his hand seems to pull at the space around him, gossamer swirled, and horror builds under me. There, on the other side of this invisible line, of the blast radius, the sky is fire. The buildings are decrepit husks blown out and forgotten, the streets overrun with debris and limbs. Behind Roxas I see the approach of other figures—strange, disjointed movements bringing them closer and closer, as if they haven't used their limbs in centuries. The disturbing, jerky slide brings them into focus, and I can see faces I used to know, people from school. Except they're all dead. Or not dead, but whatever they are now. Maybe, I think, inching just a fraction away from the line between us, it would be better if they were dead, rumors that the neutron bomb wasn't just advanced technology, that there was something wrong about the fallout, something impossible about the particles. The newscasters had been throwing a new term around: the hell bomb.
Roxas, or what used to be Roxas, holds a hand out to me. His mouth moves and I know, without a doubt, that he says my name. Says, "Axel," but all I hear are hundreds of dying people, the screams of the mentally unsound, as ashes float out of his blackened mouth.
I have to admit: I'm thinking about it. He's obviously not dead in the way he could be dead, buried or bones or food for worms. I could be with him there, and we could be happy. Would he still want to be with me? If I was burned up, just a walking corpse, would he want to be with me? I look at his flaking, scorched skin, blood dripping down his body—and I want to be with him. Unbidden, the image of touching him, lapping at the blood steaming down his jaw, comes to me. It is repulsive; it makes me ache for him. I feel my stomach heave and my dick twitch and I know, just like I knew back then, a bottle of strawberry milk to his lips: it's over for me, been over for me for a long, long time.
I'm just about to step over when the sirens blare to life behind me, the familiar desire to run for my fucking life exploding over my body. It's at this same moment my eyes find Sora on the other side and, beside him, his brother. And I'd throw myself over the line and kiss the ashes out of Roxas if not for the way Van gives me a slight, almost imperceptible, shake of his head.
No. Don't.
It's enough to make me look at Roxas, confusion flooding me. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Sora drag Van away, see Van's arm dislodge, then his head as Sora tears him apart. In front of me, Roxas shakes his hand impatiently.
"Rox, where are you?" I ask, fear blooming in thick bursts. The hell bomb; not so much an explosion as an opened door, a rip in the world. Where did Roxas go? If he's not dead, then he's…
What used to be Roxas screams at me, hundreds of people clawing at their own skin, the cries of the damned. I watch his jaw unhinge, his mouth opening wider and wider, and I can see the hell inside him, a molten, endless cavity that I'm scrambling away from, rocks cutting into my palm as I back up against the hood of the car. 50 minutes. I've got 50 minutes to run. Roxas sees what I'm doing, and instantly he's gone from sight, over the line. Suddenly the feeling of him over my shoulder is so profound that I reflexively look behind me. I know he's not there. I know he's there. 48 minutes to get 10 miles away, and the car feels like it's full of people, full of high school juniors riding to a party. Except I'm alone. Except I'm not.
What are demons except fallen angels, doomed to eternal suffering for following someone who lied to them, who tricked them? What are demons except shunned creations, sent away by a disapproving father? But that's what they want you to believe. We tend to romanticize monsters and ghosts and vampires, attracted to whatever darkness or mystique that surrounds them. We label them as misunderstood and attribute to them all the traits of a wounded, brooding hero. But monsters have no conscience, ghosts are nothing but regret, and vampires need your blood to live. We romanticize them as a way to feel safe in our beds and our homes. We romanticize them so we have peace of mind. Satan took one third of the angels of heaven with him when he waged war against heaven. You think demons are your friends? You think the Devil is gunna make you a prince of Hell if you sell your soul to him? YOU'RE A FUCKING HUMAN. They waged war on heavenbecause they hate you. They don't want to help you, don't want to aid you in vice and revenge. They don't want to be your boyfriend, don't want to kiss you just because they feel like it. They want to tear your fucking soul out and devour it.
It's quieter in Nebraska now, most everyone flown out or starved off. There's not much to do other than plant and harvest and chase off starving lunatics, but I do okay. Other than my dad and Reno, I don't have much company.
But I am never, ever alone.