Apex Book Company

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

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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