Apex Book Company

April is pure rot. Most days I don’t drag myself out of bed, and when I do? Posters with body parts are wheat-pasted up and down our block. Radio stations are mid-theory about why women get the wild, men get the crack, and kids get the numb, when the signal just bleeds out into howls. No one works at the grocery store anymore, and you can take what you want, but all that is left is unlabeled canned goods.

Our band only leaves the house as a pack. We carry tin foil balls, tasers, and baseball bats. No one we see is normal. Only a couple of people show up to our gigs, and they throw bricks and bottles at us.

At the end of April we get evicted for the fourth time in three months. Our landlord, who is at least half with it, lets us know by nailing demolition signs to our front door. At least he doesn’t blow it up while we’re inside.

We stir-fry the last of our veggies, eat them with undercooked rice, and pour gasoline over the living-room floor. We torch it and leave.

Outside on the concrete we watch the house turn from wood into fire. Flame fingers dance up and down the walls of the living room. The windows crack and shatter. We take a step back.

“Where do we go now? Any ideas, Tom?” Zaki One asks.

“Nada,” I say.

“At least we’ve got lots of options,” Miranda says. She knuckle-rubs the shadows under her eyes. “At least there’s nothing to be scared of.”

We watch fire climb up the stairs of the house.

“Let’s get out of here.”

“Think it will be different anywhere else?” Zaki Two asks.

“It has to be. There has to be somewhere….” I pull down my sleeves and check to make sure they hide my arm-cuts–little ones to let out some of my pain. I never look at Zaki and Miranda too closely. I don’t know what they have been doing to get through April. I don’t want to know.

We have to hitch out of our neighborhood because the roads have been blocked off for days. National guardsmen with flat faces and big guns have locked it down. They pretend they don’t have the crack but shoot people all the time for no reason.

A big rig stops for us a couple miles out from the bridge. If you can drive and are rich enough to own a car, they’ll let you out. We walk toward the trucker’s cab, but he opens up the empty cargo container in back instead.

His shirt has an old patch that reads, Bob.

“What do you call a man with no arms and no legs who swims in the ocean?” I ask, as I step into the container. The smell of rotten vegetables, trash, and rough-cut steel sours my mouth.

Bob throws the door shut and locks us in.

That’s how we get out of the south side three hours before the riots start and five hours before the carpet-bombing. We learn about it from Zaki’s radio, tuned to a station that has news some of the time.

We sit in the pitch black and eat our cans of food one by one, guessing what they are from the taste: peeled mandarin oranges, refried beans, and metallic tuna, maybe. After that we play music.

We were lucky to get out before the riots.

Rewind to five years ago and press play. Imagine any given day at any boring high school. I sat out behind the portables, smoking stale cigarettes stolen from my dad. Three kids walked toward me. I knew everyone at school, but I’d never seen them before. There was one cute girl and two smaller twins. A senior and two freshmen? The girl stopped a couple feet away from me and looked me up and down.

“We’ve been searching for you,” she said. “I’m Miranda. This is Zaki. Zaki’s twins, but just one, get it?”

Zaki One spat. Zaki Two glared at me.

I didn’t get it. “Do you even go here? I’m Tom.”

Miranda didn’t answer. She started singing instead. She wailed.

The sound hit me like water flooding into the desert.

She sang and I believed.

Her voice drowned out my fogginess. I could breathe even though I hadn’t noticed I’d been holding my breath. Zaki One started playing his flute. Zaki Two played the harp. Animals and desert flowers woke up from a hot, dry summer. Frogs slipped into the water and started swimming.

When they stopped, Zaki One said, “That’s your song. We wrote it for you because we need a guitar player.”

“I’m not musical,” I said with regret. Piggybacked on my words was shock that I felt regret. That I felt anything.

“Come on.” Miranda led us to the boarded up band room. We broke in. Teachers never left their classrooms, so it was easy. Miranda let me choose and the second I saw my dreadnought fender sitting all lonesome in a dusty corner, there was no other.

“Things are going to get a lot worse soon. We need a tight band. You with us?” Miranda asked.

“Sure. Why not?”

I started eating lunch with them, just like real friends.

I started practicing my guitar all the time. When I wasn’t playing, I thought of chords and moved my fingers. I hummed constantly. I got blood blisters, then sores, and then half-inch calluses on my fingertips. It took me two months, and then I could play any sound I could think of.

“We’ll need to start playing a lot of gigs. We’ll need a band name,” Miranda said.

“Well there are four–” Zaki glared at me, “–I mean three of us.”

“I like dragons,” Zaki One said. “They’re fierce.”

“I like carnies,” Zaki Two said.

“Three Ring Dragon,” Miranda said.

So that’s who we are.

The cargo container grows hot and bounces us all over. Roads suck these days, and even if Bob is just headed to the north end, it takes us hours to get there. Days, maybe. Who knows? Everything lasts longer in the dark.

“There’s an enclave I’ve heard of. Full of kids. They have a resistance ‘zine,” Zaki One says.

“Have you seen it?” Miranda asks.

“No.”

Of course he hasn’t. I scratch a scab running along my shoulder blade. I dig my nails into it. There’s always that place people talk about–Eugene, Doswallops, Glacier–where it’s better. Where the food is safe and no one’s sick with any of the diseases. Yeah, right.

“We’ll find it,” Miranda says.

Even in the darkness, I can’t conjure up belief in a safe place. I don’t ask if Miranda and Zaki believe. I need them to have more faith than me.

The truck stops and Bob opens up the rig. He holds an axe in one hand. Rope lies draped over his shoulder.

“There’s no more cargo. I have to sell you,” he says. His voice is flat. His eyes are angry. He has the crack–maybe he isn’t that far gone yet, but he is traveling on that road.

He raises his axe and steps up onto the rig. The axe catches the sun and reflects light into the cargo container. It blinds us for a moment.

Then the Three Ring Dragon smile at each other.

Did Bob think we couldn’t see him coming from a hundred miles off? These days you always have to have a plan.

Zaki plucks his harp and plays his flute. Miranda lets sound grow in her throat. I drop notes around everything. I strum an E minor and a B flat.

Bob unfurls lengths of rope.

As we start to play Bob’s song, I hope we’d at least some of it right.

Where does music come from? Nowhere. It’s something out of nothing. All we know about Bob is he looks old, tired, and like he used to have fun, but that was twenty-thousand miles and two decades gone.

So we make shit up. We play like there isn’t property, or crack men, or hard times. Our song says there is just a nice guy named Bob having a hard time.

Miranda stretches upward like a cat and dances in front of his axe. She throws her body into her voice. She sings higher than an angel, lower than Tom Waits.

I play faster, strumming the strings and pressing the wood. Just for that moment, just for then, I don’t have to feel scared and rotten. I feel gigantic.

Bob’s song wanes to a trickle of notes. He tilts from side to side before Miranda and then falls onto the metal floor. He curls up baby-style.

We jump out of the rig and down onto a root-buckled street. Zaki One takes Bob’s axe; Zaki Two takes his rope. The air smells different at this end of town. Not better: less slime mold and paint fumes, more rotting meat and burning tires.

Miranda turns around in a slow circle. “That way.” She points. “Due north. That’s where we’ll find the enclave.”

I want someone to know where we’re going, so I don’t question her as we start walking.

“It’s the music that keeps us safe. We should have turned a long time ago,” Miranda says.

“Or because we have each other,” Zaki One says. “We have love.”

“It’s because we’re still virgins and the magic unicorn light protects us,” I say.

“I’m not a virgin.” Zaki smiles at each other.

“It’s because we’re too wimpy to let go,” I say. I want them to stop talking. It hurts to think about it.

“No. It hurts more to notice,” Zaki Two says. “We’re brave warriors.”

Miranda nods and starts to say something else, but I interrupt her. I don’t like thinking about being whole and trapped in the brokenness. It makes me itchy. “I’m working on a new song,” I lie. Lying is the best way to start a song.

I make up something and teach them the chords. I mean to make it light and fun, but by the time we figure out the chorus, it’s goth times ten.

“These days the gray bleeds into me like water. These days of praise and promise fall away.”

Miranda walks beside me. I try not to notice she wears bruises underneath the collar of her shirt like a necklace. She rubs the bruises as we walk.

Rats run across the road from one overgrown lawn to another. The grass could be hiding things, I think, a moment before—

“Lock them in the basement!”

“Kill the music! Kill them! Hurt!”

Women run at us. They pour out of the houses. They leap up from the grass, carrying sewing needles and kitchen knives. They run on skinny legs encased in ragged pantyhose.

“Kill them! Bad!”

“The basement! The basement!”

Each of Zaki throws tin foil balls up into the air. Wilds love foil. Some women stop and watch the balls ascend and then fall down. When the balls hit the ground they fight for them. Some wilds keep coming though.

Miranda starts running. We follow her.

“Fuck this. Fuck this,” Miranda says with every stride. I look back and a woman is right behind me. I smell her–unwashed and musky. Her mouth is open and her face is blank with an emptiness I could fall into, should fall into. It could be over. What’s wrong with over?

“Tom!” Miranda yells.

I look forward and see the road coming to an end. A dead end sign looms to my right, and I laugh because isn’t that the truth? I jump over the thigh-high metal median and then see Zaki and Miranda floating out in front of me. They fall into nothing. We’ve run off a cliff and it takes us a while to land. I like the way down but then—

Crunch.

Ow.

Everything pops with pain.

The women on the cliff top above us howl. They could climb down, but this looks to be the edge of their territory.

“Fuck wilds!” I yell up at them.

“The basement,” one yells. “The basement!”

I spit blood on the ground and ask, “Are you guys okay?”

“Fine,” Miranda says.

“Wonderful,” Zaki One says.

“I heard a snap–a bone break. It wasn’t mine,” I say.

Miranda looks distant.

“Wasn’t me,” the Zakis say.

“A twig?” Miranda says.

“No. Bone.”

“A branch?”

“Don’t be a masochist. We can go to the library and check out books on bones. I can make you a cast or something.”

“Tom,” Miranda says.

“What?”

“Pain helps. Let it help,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

“Fine. Whatever. But if I see bone I’m going to be pissed.”

“Uh….” Zaki Two grins.

“Oh, ha ha ha,” I say, and then laugh for real.

Everyone loves a boner joke. At least we do. It feels good to laugh and not think about pain and breaking apart. When we start walking, Miranda hunches over and both of Zaki limps.

* * *

Before I left home, things got bad.

My dad would come home from work with his briefcase full of half-rotten fruit and hunks of raw meat. He’d yell, “Honey, I’m home.” He’d have a dead snake slung across his back and would dump everything onto the kitchen table and glare at me. My mom, wearing a perma-glazed stoner grin, would clap her hands in delight.

My mom threw wet laundry into my dresser. She let the kettle boil on the stove for so long that it melted. She went out shopping and wouldn’t come back for days.

My little sister carried a walking stick everywhere she went. She randomly hit the floor with it . I tried to talk to her, but she would stare at me with the wizened, desert-strained eyes of a hermit and growl.

Every night my mom made us sit around the dinner table, say grace, and eat.

“Our holiest of high up fathers,” she began, and then squinted and looked confused. “Our thanks to our joy and shit, it’s all dogshit and starlight, and fuck you….”

On and on. No one else noticed.

Then Dad started yelling, “Amen, amen, amen,” and then we dished out our raw snake steaks with canned beans poured on top.

I asked, “Can I be excused?”

“No. Fuck you,” Mom said.

“We’ve been sitting here three hours.”

“No. Asshole. Shit-spawn.”

The night before I left for good, I strummed in my room, working on a tune that didn’t yet know what it wanted to be. My sister came in, hobbling behind her stick.

“Tom,” she said.

I smiled. It had been a while since she’d known my name.

“Tom, it’s ending, isn’t it? We’re all going on a long trip, aren’t we?”

I didn’t know what to say. Every generation thinks it’s going to be the last. Everyone in history is always waiting for everything to end, but then it never does. Right?

My sister looked like she wanted to cry, but didn’t remember how. She curled up like a dog at the foot of my bed and slept. The next day I packed a duffle bag and went to school.

Miranda and Zaki took me to their apartment. It was easy to make rent. Whenever our landlady showed up, we just gave her flowers, postage stamps, tin foil balls, or whatever.

“Almost there now,” Miranda says. She turns and gives me a look. A come-hither look?

Maybe.

I walk closer to her. I could hold her hand. I could put an arm around her, that wouldn’t be weird, right? Is that what she wants, or would it ruin everything?

The sound of breaking glass cuts into the moment–if we were even having one. The band draws closer together and follows the sound to a row of junked-up cars tilted onto their sides. People peek out at us in between the hoods and trunks.

“Looks good. Looks paranoid,” Zaki One says.

“Paranoid’s still afraid. Paranoid’s good,” Miranda whispers.

“Paranoid is awesome. What could be bad about paranoia?” I say. “Can we come in?” I yell. “We’re kids from the south side.”

They poke rifles toward us. Zaki Two takes a step forward, a sick grin on his face, like let’s get this over with.

“We’ll play for you.” Zaki One holds up a flute. He runs up to stand beside his brother.

“We’re the Three Ring Dragon,” Miranda adds.

They grunt, lower the guns, and push aside a Geo Metro to let us in.

“Welcome,” a girl says. She smiles and for a second there’s someone home, but then she blinks and goes away inside of herself.

We walk up a little hill and the first thing I notice is kids milling about in a grassy field. They look skinny and tired. Beyond the grass sits a sprawling old hospital next to a smokestack with something silvery balanced on top of it.

When the kids see us, they get up and shamble toward us. The band holds hands. Zaki Two has something sharp embedded in his hand. I look down and see a piece of wire jammed into the flesh between his thumb and pointer finger. I have two thoughts: that’s disgusting, and that’s a really good idea.

The kids come closer. Hundreds of them. They smell nasty and look broken–but who doesn’t look bad these days? They seem excited, almost agitated, to see us.

“They’re a band,” one kid says.

“All our batteries are dead,” another adds.

“Everything downloaded is gone. We miss it,” a boy says.

The kids nod and all lose interest in us.

“We miss a lot of things too,” Miranda says. “It’s been hard, but we’ll be okay now?”

“We’re keeping safe,” a girl mutters. “Safe as a time bomb. What?”

A boy scratches at an infected cow brand burned into his forearm. The pain wakes him up a little. “Will you play? We need you to play.”

“We’ll play.”

Pain helps. Music helps. Coffee helps. Whole wheat bread, the sound of bells, and cranberry juice helps. So do dogs and cats.

Beer doesn’t. TV doesn’t. Magazines and most books don’t. Talking helps, but it’s getting hard to talk and not scream.

Someone graffitied pictures of wolves along the concrete walls of the hospital. Graffiti helps, especially if it takes a while to figure out the lettering.

“Maybe the wolves are the problem,” I say. A couple years back they’d bitten a lot of people.

“Nah, they’re extinct,” Zaki One says.

“Like us,” Miranda whispers. She presses her hand against her collarbone and winces.

“What’s that silver thing up on the smokestack?” I ask to change the subject.

We walk to it and see a big metal dog cage lying perched on top of it. A girl in pink and white sits up there. I can just make out her pout from the ground.

Someone has done a half-ass job of mortaring spiraled stairs up the smokestack. I climb them with Miranda. Zaki stands watch below with folded arms. The stairs hold and we make it all the way up.

The caged girl is pretty in a high-school popular kind of way. “I know you,” I say. “How do I know you?”

Miranda hums a melody, and the girl sits up and smiles. Her cage creaks and shifts. The bottom of her dress is soot stained from the tendrils of smoke that rise from the smoldering biohazards beneath.

“You know my song.” She turns her head from side to side, and it is like looking at an advertisement for something I don’t want to buy.

Miranda sings, “Baby I long for you. I want you. Ooh. Aah.”

The girl echoes the words. Where Miranda’s voice hits every note with an easy precision, the girl’s throaty voice grinds sex into everything.

I know who she is: the tweeny crooner, perfume huckster, pop princess of an empire long gone.

Let her rot, I think as she rises to her knees. The dog kennel is too low to let her stand. I see that she’s had to stay very still to keep it from tottering off the smoke stack.

“They’ve stopped feeding me. They’ve forgotten about me, even though they launched this huge fucked-up mission to rescue me,” she says. “They got jobs at the hotel I was staying in, and after my show they smuggled me out in the service elevator with all this talk about seizing the means of entertainment production and liberating the iconic goddess. It was cool for a while. They liked to listen to me sing, but then they stuck me up here and forgot.” She coughs and spits blackened phlegm down into the hole of the smokestack below.

“You sound… normal,” I say.

The princess nods. “I’m immune or something. I’ve been writing my own songs up here. I never got to do that before. You have to get me out.”

The clasped lock lies outside of her reach.

“We have a band. Three Ring Dragon,” Miranda says, as she undoes the lock. “We could use a back-up singer.”

The girl rises and looks Miranda up and down. I can see her thinking–too chubby, too dark, too plain–but then the princess slouches forward. “I was never that good at singing anyway,” she says.

“We know.” Miranda smiles.

As the princess steps out, she kicks her cage. It falls over the other side of the smokestack, and we hear it clang onto the ground.

“Not cool!” Zaki One yells up.

“You almost hit me,” Zaki Two adds.

“Sorry,” the princess says airily. She leads the way down. Her legs wobble, but she stays upright.

“You’re still the princess,” I whisper to Miranda.

“I’d rather be the revolting peasant,” she whispers back. We make it down to the ground and none of the kids minds that we liberated their princess from her tower.

No one notices.

Looking for a place to practice, we enter the cold halls of the hospital and take the stairs up to the roof. A docked helicopter sits like a forlorn spider, and we can see the city from every direction. We see the blast-marks and smoke from our old neighborhood. When we start practicing, we face away from it.

The princess makes us more powerful. She adds in sound where there’d only been silence before. She gets us, and maybe soon, if everything goes well, we’ll become the Four Ring Dragons.

We play and look down on the kids on the hill. They move like puppets whose master keeps forgetting about them. I can’t look too long without a numbness floating up in me.

We write a song about them. Not a song to start with, but one to end with. We’ve never written a song for so many people before. Maybe with the Princess it will work.

At dusk we walk down the cement stairs and out onto the overgrown field. Kids lie motionless on the grass. Others light a pile of dried brush and throw slabs of gray meat onto the flames.

“Think it’s safe to eat?” Miranda asks.

“No. It probably comes from around here,” Zaki One says.

“Going to eat it anyway,” Zaki Two says. “No choice. We never get a choice.”

“Let’s play first,” I say. “Let’s play hungry. It’ll give us an edge.” Something in the air feels different tonight. The fire reminds me of summer camp, sing-a-longs, and marshmallows.

I tune my guitar and play like Jimi, then Page, and then Johnson. Just to show off a little. Then I start to play like me. Like everything I know and everything that’s happened comes into my music.

“Been standing so long,” Miranda croons, and then repeats it.

The princess echoes, “So long, so long,” on the backbeat. Zaki’s flute and harp come in under and over my guitar.

“Been standing so long I forgot how to sit. How to leave. How to fly.” It’s one of the first songs we ever wrote together. We rock it. Even the princess doesn’t miss a note.

Like mosquitoes at dusk, kids draw near and surround us. They stand too close. The princess swirls around and forces them to back off. We reach the end of our first song, and I see a few kids crying.

Pain is good.

Our next song cuts deeper. It’s stripped down and harsh. We wrote it a couple of years ago; back when we were playing to sold-out shows and kids remembered how to thrash. Miranda screams and I break a guitar string trying to match her. Around us kids sway like it is a love song.

Feel, I think as I play. Remember. Wake up. We can still make something in this world. The anger in the song thrums out between my fingers like artery blood from a deep wound.

We play another song, and another. It feels like every kid left in the entire city gathers around us. I see someone smile. I see a couple of people dance together. I focus on the music and what we are saying with every word and chord.

Survive this. Wake up. Wake up.

We are playing better than we ever have. I feel reality changing around us, just a little. Then it comes time for us to sing their song–the one we wrote today. My hand cramps. I feel thirsty and a little dizzy, but none of that matters. I let the music use me.

Their song is big, brash, and violent. It starts hard and it keeps on going. We play it like the numb doesn’t exist. We play it to break them apart. As I play, I imagine we could start something here. We could grow food and keep everything bad out. We could have parties, make clothes, and maybe one day make babies. We could become a tribe.

“Nobody remembers who you are. Everyone remembers what you want to be,” Miranda wails, twice as loud as any of our instruments.

I see them changing just like I did, like we’d been trying to make people change from the beginning. Even if it wakes them up to an awful world, I want them here. I want them with me.

The song hits the guitar solo and I start rocking. The princess takes a step forward and away from the band. I think she is going to swirl around again, but instead she starts singing.

“To the roof, to the roof,” she yells. I look at Miranda and Zaki One. They shrug. I play louder to drown her out. Miranda starts ululating, but it’s too late.

The princess bolts toward the hospital and, like lemmings, the kids follow in her wake.

Miranda sings louder, but there are only a couple dozen kids left. They’re numb and stare at us dumbly.

I play the wrong chord. Miranda forgets the lyrics, and Zaki Two isn’t playing his harp at all.

We hear yells from the roof. Zaki One plays a fierce flute melody that should have, maybe, been able to reach them up there. I play with him. Miranda too. We aren’t playing a song anymore; we’re just making noise.

I see a flash of long golden princess hair. She stands on the edge of the roof, and then throws herself over. She flies like a bird, like a triumph, and I ache to be up there with her. Only my guitar keeps me on the ground.

Rivers of kids follow behind. Dark shapes drop off the roof. Down and down, and I would have thought they would hit silently, but they don’t. They scream. Their bodies thump and crunch.

One scream is louder than the others. It’s nearby. Zaki One screams and flails and throws his flute down.

I pull my gaze away from the flying, falling, dying kids and see that it’s only Zaki One screaming. Zaki Two is gone. My head whips back to the kids falling, and I think I see Zaki Two, but I’m not sure. Miranda moans and kneels beside Zaki One. I go to them, to my real tribe, and wonder how we are going to survive this.

Zaki One scratches his cheeks deep enough to make scars. Miranda tears off her shirt, and I see the rough edge of her collarbone jutting out. I hold them both. I push up my sleeves to show them that I hurt, too. Behind us, the kids keep falling.

After they blew up our neighborhood–after the rig and the axe, the deranged housewives, and the suicide party, we hop a train heading south. We talk about reaching avocado and salsa land, but our voices are brittle and fragile. It’s better not to talk at all. The train veers east and north, and it gets a lot colder.

We watch each other and hold each other when one of us wants to jump off. The train moves faster and faster every hour. We see soldiers marching through wheat fields toward small towns. We see mountain lions running alongside the train. I tell a story about never getting off and riding until we become the wind. Or I tell a story about riding until we get so far north, up to the ice caps, that people can’t get sick because the air is too clean. Maybe there is a place like that left. Maybe.

END

---

Katherine has sold stories to Escape Pod, Aeon, Nightshade Press, and a
few others. She attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop in 2005. When
not writing like a chipmunk on maple syrup, she enjoys long urban hikes
with many stops along the way for fresh baked goods. She is currently
working on a young adult science fiction novel.

Illustration by Justin Stewart

---

Related posts:

1. Short Fiction: Reindeer Games
2. Ten Days of Amanda Palmer - Day 7
3. Short Fiction: Camera Eye