Eclectic essay collection from NYT bestselling author and Apex contributing editor Alethea Kontis. With a special introduction from Brian Keene. Learn more 
Short Fiction: Junkyard Dogs
The night was a bitter black glittering with a thousand points of light. Temple watched a sad-faced girl making a boat out of folded paper, her hands trembling as she let it sail away down the gutter with all of her hopes and dreams stashed aboard. Even before it floundered in the drain the girl shrank back into her doorway, pulling the collar of her threadbare coat up around her throat. The wind had that familiar cutting edge to its caress. Any day now, snow. Someone pushed past him, head down, a grunt of apology or accusation lost in the folds of their scarf.
Reaching into his pocket for his tobacco tin and the makings of a cigarette, Temple sat himself down on the stoop of a crumbling tenement. A washer woman’s mop sloshed around his feet, suds soaking down through the cracks in the pavement. Ignoring her, Temple watched the girl. Her fingers moved through some kind of sign, twitching out a subliminal message to her soul. He had seen it before. Give up, it said in the language of the streets. Curl up in your doorway and die. Close your eyes on the end of the world and open them again on some fantastic place. He drew a deep breath into his lungs. Let the smoke waft up over his face like a veil of ghosts.
While he smoked, bodies wrapped in society’s cast off bits and pieces shuffled in and out of the small soup kitchen that had once been the Christus Church clutching their tinfoil trays of mashed potato and meatballs, drinking in the aromatic steam of hot food. The spectres of the Lady Hamilton Hotel and the lead-stripped spire of the old church haunted the maze of dirty streets. Temple exhaled another wraith of smoke for this ghost town. In the distance the bells of the meat wagons played their nursery rhymes, taunting these living, still breathing corpses. Kids crawled over the husk of a car, caught half in half out of the broken glass teeth of a shop window in the devastated shopping mall. Back in the darkness he observed the naked shelves – long ago stripped of any material offerings.
Temple ground out the cigarette butt beneath his heal, feeling nothing as he listened to the cries of “Bring out your dead, bring out your dead” because they weren’t his dead. They had no claim on his soul, on the emptiness deep in his gut that was like a worm tunnelling its way to his outer consciousness.
A cannonball was lodged in the second story of the building on the street corner. It was an odd little detail but it stuck with him.
A scuffle broke out in the food line, a metal tray clattering to the floor, food wasted. Lupus-disfigured hands scrabbled after it, stuffing it into more than one hungry mouth. He watched it all with a sense of dislocation. It was the play of every day life but it didn’t matter. It didn’t touch him. There was nothing here for him. These unforgiving streets weren’t his home. These hopeless actors weren’t his friends. He was one of a new breed. The Dispossessed. He was just another scavenger feeding off the bloated corpse of this Brave New World.
He hadn’t seen any real traffic for days. Since before the Millennium Clock on the wharf stopped ticking. We’re not so different, you and I, he thought, watching a fat-bodied rat pick a path through the mound of feces steaming on the street corner. But of course they were different; the rat was a survivor where he had given up trying to survive. Temple pushed himself to his feet, turned his back on the black rat, and joined the thin-faced crowd with his battered food tray.
The Eastern edge of the square was a corrugated iron fence. Rust-pitted gates hung like the broken wings of a fallen angel. some forgotten son had painted “The Gates of Heaven” across the ripples of iron, and they might just as well have been. Headless statues of long dead statesmen stood either side of the gates, keeping a blind watch. Through the gates, at the end of the Yellowbrick Road, sat the old Kings Palace where the politicians buried their heads in the sand while they waited for a miracle that wasn’t coming.
An old tank rumbled slowly along the line of the iron fence, caterpillar tracks eating the rubble and rock dust of the road, a snake of street boys, Burgess’s Droogs come to life, dancing in its wake, their faces painted white and tattooed with spider webs. The scavengers had come to loot the corpses; their wordless whooping chant ululated through the old town.
An olive-skinned boy threw himself in front of those relentless tracks, light and flame engulfing his corpse as one of the web-faced street boys poured gasoline on his blue jeans and another ignited it with a carelessly tossed match. Other faces turned away but Temple watched the boys’ burning dance, fascinated by the slowly charring skin and the blisters that wept beneath the flames.
A pretty young girl – twelve, less maybe, or more, it was difficult to tell with kids these days, they all looked the same – moved down the food line, offering her wilted flowers for sale. Her brother worked the subway entrance, polishing strangers’ shoes and hoping for a miracle in silver. She moved past Temple, the hunger starkly visible in her watery eyes. He could only shrug when she offered the sad blooms, swapping a dull coin for a brighter smile. Like a magician, he drew a second coin from behind her ear and pressed it into her hand. “Take it and feed yourself,” he whispered, looking at the emptying trays of food further up the line. “Somewhere,” He was going to say nice but instead said, “better than this.”
When it was his turn, Temple took a ladleful of the swill they were serving and five meatballs the size of his knucklebones, picking out the black flecks of dead insect as he ate. After inhaling the meager offering, he licked the tray clean and buried it beneath the folds of his coat.
Temple cupped his hands around his mouth and blew a funnel of warm air back up over his face. He stamped his feet, trying to force the blood to flow before he started another lonely walk between the dead buildings and their baleful ghosts. Of course, they weren’t real ghosts, weren’t the spectres of dead fireboys burned beneath the eyes of the street kids, or the wraiths of hope cast adrift on a gutter sea in paper boats. No. These were the ghosts of celluloid and memory, of newspaper cuttings and a life that belonged to someone else. He had nothing and that was just the way he needed it.
What is identity anyway? He asked the face he saw distorted in a store window. A question of self-worth and ownership? There was a hole where his life should have lived, and in that hole he was left to invent himself, his dreams, his past. How much time had passed since he woke in that fleapit motel, bills paid four weeks in advance, with nothing more than the clothes on his back and line of bruises and needle marks marring the inside of his left thigh?
That had been the worst, not knowing himself. Not owning a history. A personality. Values. He had stared at his naked body in the mirror, no memory of who he saw being who he actually was, and forced himself to pick a name from the Gideon bible on the nightstand.
“My body is my Temple,” he whispered out loud, tasting the rightness in the bitter irony of the words – that his body was all he had, and so he was reborn: Temple.
In the memories he gave himself, Temple had prayed for immortality as a child, when the nightmares had seemed so real, when the night itself was the loneliest time and simply making it through from one side of it to the other was a small victory. Walking through the crowds of Shuffling Dead, Temple knew this kind of mute eternity wasn’t an immortality worth craving. He needed to find a new dream – one worth living.
A beady-eyed black bird watched him from the window ledge of the old Rigoletto cinema. Rubble and broken stones lined the sidewalk. Through the rubble a baby’s arm clung to the life it was yet to live. Temple dropped to his knees and began pulling the stones away, throwing them across the street as he desperately tried to dig the baby out of its premature coffin, moving urgently at first but then slowing as the hopelessness of it settled over him. What was he doing? Delaying its death by a day, maybe two. He couldn’t feed himself let alone another mouth. He stood, dusted off his bleeding hands and walked away, leaving the baby to what he hoped wouldn’t be a lingering death. It still hurt, the sense of utter uselessness life had thrust upon him. What sort of man was he? The sort of man capable of leaving a child to die, he muttered bitterly. The bird watched it all. And maybe through its bird eyes it could see the baby’s life force slipping away as the threads binding soul to skin and bone unravelled. Maybe.
The baby’s cries followed him down three streets before they quieted. Gritting his teeth, he walked on.
A hospital tent had been set up on the corner of Stora Nygatan, beneath the awning of the Grey Monk Cafe. People queued for their weekly fix of rehabilitators, slack skin and sharp bones denying the promise of healing offered by the Red Cross on the side of the dusty tent. Above them, the night sky was full of phosphorous stars on strings, cheap two-dimensional lies less real than the old celluloid ones that had lit up the city like a bonfire before the Fall.
The Fall.
Those first few days just after the Fall had been the worst. The mask of civilization slipped from the Death’s Head of the world, and beneath, the bone grin, the bloody teeth and vacant sockets of chaos eager to be unleashed. That’s when Nina had been born, from the ruined face of a movie starlet. Nina, with her eyes so full of sky and diamonds. Her name was still on the billboards and hoardings surrounding the Rigoletto, her fake plastic smile broken down the middle like her fake plastic heart. Her right cheek lay in pieces on the floor, ground into the dirt of the street. But no amount of rain could wash away those diamonds. He had dreamed a world where she was his lover and confidant. Through that she gave him hope. In return he gave her all of his love, did fall in love and did feel the need and the ache that went with finding himself alone again now that she was his, one of his dead.
His were not the corpses stacked up waiting for the meat wagons. No, his dead were the memories he’d made up and fed off daily. Ghosts he couldn’t escape. Every building, every street and alleyway sheltered spectres he’d created and couldn’t kill.
Rain began to fall.
He watched her as she came running down the street — watched her slender white legs, watched her small, roughly-shod feet stumbling over the cracks in the pavement. She still clutched her bunch of dead flowers in her hand. Her head was back and she was running hard. Tears mingled with the rain on her cheeks.
Then she saw him and began running harder. She tripped on an uneven splinter of stone and fell face first, her hands flung out to break her fall. Her face twisted with the pain but she didn’t stop to cry, just pushed herself back to her feet and carried on running straight towards Temple as if her life depended upon it.
“My brother,” she gasped, desperation in her eyes and hands as she grabbed at him. Little girl lost. “They’ve taken him.”
“Hold on. Who’s taken him? Where?”
“A jeep came. The spider-faces were all over it. They grabbed him and took him through The Gate. Mister, please. You’ve got to help me…”
“Why?” Temple asked simply.
“Because you’re different. You gave me money. You helped me once.”
”I helped you once. Doesn’t mean I’ll do it again. Give me a good reason not to walk away and leave you here.”
“They’ll kill him if you don’t.”
“Maybe they’ve already killed him?”
“No,” she said, refusing to believe what was probably the truth.
“Even if they haven’t killed him, why should I care about one more death on my hands? No, little one, your answer isn’t good enough. People die. Deal with it. Move on.”
“Bastard,” she hissed.
“Of course I am. That’s how I stay alive. You should try to become more like me if you want to live a few years. Charity doesn’t last. And what do you have when it’s gone? Your body? Maybe someone will like it.”
She looked around helplessly. “I’ll pay you,” she said, fastening onto the idea with a bright flare of hope.
“How?”
“My body,” she offered, and for a moment Temple found himself studying the shapeless lines of her body: the curves had already begun to define the woman she was becoming.
“No,” he said, a wry smile touching his lips for the first time. “I like a little more meat on the bones I fuck. Offer me something I want and I’ll think about getting myself killed for you, little one.”
She looked helplessly at the sad flowers still clutched in her hand. He shook his head. “I have a little money,” she said without meeting his eyes.
“I doubt you have enough. Something else?”
“Nothing,” she said, tears welling again. “I have nothing except my brother, and and and…”
“Then think child, think of something you might know, might have seen, that I might need. Think of something worth buying a life with, and think quickly.”
“But there’s nothing except this,” she protested, stabbing at her chest with sharp fingers.
“Then he dies.” Temple turned away and started to walk off. He couldn’t bring himself to look Nina in her billboard eyes.
What kind of monster have I become? Or worse, was I this monster all along?
He stopped walking and turned to look back at the child, a glimmer of guilt in his heart. “Give me a reason,” he said again.
“I don’t understand.”
“I need a reason. I want the life that goes with it. I want a purpose. Give me that, little mother, and I’ll go fetch your brother.”
He took her small hands in his bigger ones, stroked her bloody palms with gentle thumbs. “I am Nobody,” he whispered, saying it as a name. “Do you understand that? I don’t exist. No papers, no family, no life, no future, no past. There is no meaning to my life. No point. No purpose. If I died today no one would grieve for me. There are no lives out there that I have touched. No one lies awake wondering where I am. No one comes begging strangers to save me.”
“We,” she said hesitantly. “We could be your family…”
A faint smile touched his hard lips. “You could, but I can’t feed myself let alone two more mouths.”
“But this isn’t fair! You said –”
“Life isn’t fair, little one. Remember that.”
“Then make saving Luke your purpose, Mister. People go missing every day. Make them your purpose. Make your life mean something. Make it mean their survival.” A slow smile crept across her face. She spat on her palm and pressed it out at him. “That sounds like a life worth living to me, Mister.” She said, waiting for Temple to shake her hand.
He took her delicate hand again and shook it, amused by the seriousness in her eyes. “Do you have a picture of him? Something I can use to make sure I rescue the right rugrat?”
She rummaged through the folds of her skirts and pulled out a sepia-tinged portrait of a happy family. Her hand trembled slightly. He looked at her again, reassessed her age as closer to fifteen. This was her history; no wonder she didn’t want to let go of it. She probably couldn’t remember this happy family any better than he could remember his own.
“You’ll get it back, I promise.”
Reluctantly, she handed it over – a boy and a girl, on the lawn outside a big old country house. Not big enough to be called a mansion, but big enough to mean money. Lots of it. Behind them, an angel with a face of still waters and picnics and motherhood. Contentment shimmered in the clear blue of her eyes. Temple felt a twinge of jealousy as he slipped the photograph into his pocket. Then that familiar emptiness took over.
“Bring him home to me, please, mister.”
“Temple,” he said, winking with a confidence he didn’t feel. “That’s my name. Not mister.”
“Temple,” she said, tasting it on her lips. “Sounds like you have God on your side, Mr. Temple.”
“Well, you just never know. He has to be on someone’s side, right? So why not mine? Give me two hours, if I am not back here…well, go get someone else. Maybe they’ll have more luck.”
“I’ll wait,” the girl said earnestly. “And you’ll bring him back. I know you will. I know it.” For all that she had seen in a life lived on the streets, she had somehow managed to retain some of the simple innocence of youth. Despite himself, he found himself warming to her. That was bad.
He nodded slightly, touching a finger to her lips. “Two hours.” And he slipped off, moving back in the direction of the square. He didn’t look back.
END
This is the first 3,000 or so words of Steven Savile’s novella Temple: Incarnations from Apex Publications.
The next 27,000 words can be bought for only $9.95 at the Apex Shopping Mall!
Visit Steven Savile’s website at http://www.stevensavile.com/
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