Drink For The Thirst To Come Part 29

"Halfheart tries to see more with his match. That Siamese shadow does a slow hootchie, like a stalking snake in Jungle Jim, like Yma Sumac warbling in Secret of the Incas, like...

"Then everyone, all of sudden, everyone gets it. Same time, I guess, everyone realizes Rory, Keegan, they're bait and the hook's setting good.

"PD is the one who went for it, PD who apologized for everything. Imagine. PD runs at them, like he's going to, I don't know, s.n.a.t.c.h Keegan, save him from that embrace there in Skidoo's Tap or wherever the h.e.l.l they were. And the others follow. Daryl at a.s.s end, Daryl who'd had a taste and for the first time in his life knew what was what.

"Halfheart's match gets close. Rory and Keegan's shadow spreads. Their darkness fills the wall, the sky, whatever. They withdraw, Rory holding his big brother. He opens. He's a kite, a sail. And they fly. They fly into their own shadow, high and out of reach. Except for PD. The leap of his life. He catches Keegan by the sneak and he's off with them, dangling, hanging, slow.

"There are voices, sounds, but I guess voices. Words, language I don't know, not German, which we all knew a little of, not Polish, not Dago or Indian.

"Then we're out. Outside, running after, following hard. Out somewhere, a place we'd never been, a place where n.o.body'd been. Except it was..."

The old guy looked at me, just eyes for a few seconds. A few seconds of eye can be forever on a dark bus, at the end of a long story, middle of the night.

"Except outside was the corner, Spring Road, the underpa.s.s. Okay. We were all still standing in Skidoo's Tap. Sure, sure. But where we ran was that road into starlight, the world Daryl told us. We're on that road to forever, nothing holding us like Rory held Keegan and Keegan's sneaks held PD. We ran. Like topping the Nutcracker, like the first time a run takes you whole and you know you're free of gravity, earth, body."

"Yes," I said.

"Yeah, then we're under. The subway. Something like the subway. Smelled like the subway..."

"Dusty farts," I said.

"And antique p.i.s.s," he said. "Then that smell of meat, dead meat and old. Rory and Keegan, they're ahead and we follow them up the wall curving onto that arched ceiling. We're small things. Animals or bugs running upside down, we leap old stars or burned out lamps, we find old holes in the world up there, we burrow into the ceiling's cracks and we wiggle, follow Keegan and Rory and dangling PD through..." He thought for a second. "Funny, you know. All the years gone since then. I've thought about it. But this now, this is the farthest I've gotten into it. Aloud. You know how it is? To yourself a thing's one thing, saying makes it something else."

"Yes."

"So. It's dirt, rock, root, and grubs. All that flows by as we wriggle. Rory, Keegan, and PD are just ahead. The world sings. And we flow, now. No wriggles or running. We're riding the rails, bottom of the rails, under the steel rails of the yards, we're sliding a greased track to someplace ahead, someplace forever, and...

"And I don't know who it was who stopped. Stopping was a son-of-a-b.i.t.c.h. Fall down a well. Try to stop. It all keeps moving. Remember 2001? The falling keeps on and on.

"But someone was a hero. Someone said, 'No!' Put on the binders. Saved us all. We stopped, then there we were."

"Where?"

"h.e.l.l, I guess it was. Or heaven. Same thing. That Rory and Keegan shadow that ate the world, the darkness that became the world? That big thing zoomed down to a pinp.r.i.c.k and-"

He stopped again.

"For Daryl, it was a forest. Trees tall as mountains, thick as skysc.r.a.pers. 'Great dignity'-what he said later, looked like 'old G.o.ds reaching...'" The old guy raised both arms. His hands nearly touched the luggage rack. "They reached over the world and shaded Earth from the sun. Shaded Daryl from the sun. Shadows spread everywhere. Living patterns. Bright and dark all around, whole worlds in bright, others in dark. Daryl. He wandered those worlds for, he didn't know, hours, years. There never was another place like it, there never were sounds like those that fell from the crying sky and breathing trees, sounds, songs, voices. Daryl. He could taste the smell of the world. He's just a little bitty bug, a little pinch-thing, scrabbling along, then flying, dreaming worlds, worlds that grew and grew until he's just another little bug chittering up the trees again.

"And the best was, he felt like these great old people..."

"The trees?"

"Yeah, yeah trees. They were great old people I think they were, great quiet old people, but they knew me. They knew I was there, and they were teaching, giving me..."

"What?"

"Whatever I needed."

I understood.

"All the guys had stories like Daryl's. Later, they all talked. Were warriors, pilots, kings... Well, you know. Heaven stuff. Stuff you always want and know not to expect."

He was quiet.

"Then Halfheart lit another match. Another heroic act unprecedented in all the world's braveries. Then PD. PD lets go of Keegan. Gave up, a hero. PD falls from them to us. Then everyone died. Died or something, anyway there they were. All the guys but Keegan. And the guys were in Skidoo's surrounded by regulars, the regular faces from the stools, whiskers, and hay bags. All around. Arms, rags, bones, old flesh. They all reached out. A hundred scoots but they're close now, close to touch, close to smell. Bones and hanks of hair reach to embrace as though the guys had been invited. Dead meat reached out like that octopoid goes for Flash Gordon... Like dead Rory held his brother, Jackie, our Keegan.

"I don't know if it was Halfheart's light or what." He tapped my book. "Just matchlight, not sun, but the rags and bones and hanks fell away. And Halfheart hit the beach at Normandy. He was over the bar. He's smashing bottles and rivers of whiskey flow, alcohol fills the air. He screamed movie Kraut, Shorty hooted Indian, PD screamed 'Sorry! Sorry! Sorry!' like a war-cry. Everyone shouts their own personal scoot-and-run. Thumbs and matches were everywhere. Lights flared. Fire, fire everywhere. And we ran, everyone ran. Not Keegan. Not Rory. Not the regulars or the invited. They were flames. Like I said. Flames drifting on the dark. The stink of John Walker ignites. Whoof!

"Then, whoosh, the guys are out and down the steps. Flames suck out on a rush of Skidoo air. They writhe like snakes, they rise, jaws snap night.

"The guys ran like h.e.l.l. h.e.l.l, we were kids. Scared s.h.i.tless kids. Fearless? Not us. Bravery's over. We'd just killed. Keegan at least. Our Keegan. Others. 'Boes and whatever. We'd torched Skidoo's. Rory, the rest and regulars were already dead. You know... See? Thing about them," he tapped my book with its lurid cover, "they have gifts. Plenty of them. They're old. They're powerful. But they're weak, too. In the end, they're just smoke and memory. Ashes and dust."

He leaned so the smell of him was close, comfortable. "When someone like you is near, see? They burn. They're fire in the night. They take and take and take you running in starlight. Send you flying to some paradise you want so much you'll leave your pain for them to gobble-gobble. Well, f.u.c.k them." He pressed a finger into my chest. "That pain in there, that's you, the pain. The stuff that makes you alive. See? See, life's beautiful, but the world? Oh, the world's s.h.i.t."

"Maybe not me," I said. "Do I have pain? Too much 'real'? Nah. So what happened? To you small felons, I mean?"

"So what happened? We murderers, we ran. Back to the Place. Bikes still there. Still dark. We walked them, ran them all the way around the yards, across the tracks downtown. Fire trucks coming everywhere to the conflagration, top of Spring Road.

"From the East End it looked like the world was dying. Fires are scary to kids. Something old, something that always was, is going away, becoming light and heat then ash. We walked roundabout and were back on the End in time to catch dawn and the fire dying."

The bus downshifted, slowed.

"Caught h.e.l.l for being out all night. All of us. 'We're watching the fire,' we said. 'Nah, we never seen Keegan.' 'Nah, no idea where he was.' Played it smooth. When we visited the pit we were shaking, Halfheart chattering too loud about being quiet, keeping shut if we knew what was good for us. The hole where Skidoo's Tap was, was..." He took a moment. "Was there for as long as I knew. Three concrete steps on the corner. Climb them, look one way, there's the view. Turn 'round, there's a hole in the world where Skidoo's was. An old tunnel, maybe. Brewer is on old limestone. Old limestone has caves, they said. Anyway, Skidoo's fell in, down to nowhere. Halfheart said once, maybe the last time he ever said anything to all of us, he said, 'Wonder if my old man's down there? I hope,' he said, 'hope he fried.'

"Never did find out the why of them. How. What. Something at Chucky B's maybe, something Indian and old in the old ground around Brewer, you know, great spirits, some bulls.h.i.t. Why'd they come back? What gave them the power? Just Brewer's small men hanging 'round after the dance. You know? Anyway.

"Anyway, one by one all the guys did what was not expected. They left. Scattered."

The bus stopped, hissed. Outside was blue and dark. Yellow lamps lit a block-long platform topped by corrugated rust. The terminal was shingles and shadow, a thing from the 1920s, a single story and a clock. The clock had no hands. No one waited for train or bus.

"Brewer," the driver called, "all for Brewer." The door opened. Whoosh.

The old guy was up. He had no luggage.

"I know who you are," I said.

"Nah, you don't. Names are changed, like I said."

"Like you said. One more thing?"

"One more thing? Well?"

"Never mind," I said. "I'd ask the wrong thing, anyway."

"Anyway, I'll tell you: all the guys stayed gone. I guess forever." He smiled in the blue. "Maybe not. Hey. Enjoy Philly," he said. He was out the door and headed north and the bus pulled out.

I had time.

We were on the turnpike to Philly when I let night and flame float me, carry me through the darkness, back.

Not hard to find. The old guy stood by a flat spot on the hill above the quiet rail yards. He never saw me. Never saw the snow snakes, the other critters of air and dark. Never felt the embrace, the drawing out. Maybe at the end. I took him, was full, and was back in my seat on the bus before Philadelphia.

I was going to ask about the girl, the carriage, the babies. But I didn't have to.

FINAL WORDS.

If you are content with the stories, if you don't care to know from where these things came, so be it. I hope you've enjoyed them.

If you want to know something of how or why they were written, here you go. Let's begin at the beginning.

FROM A NATION OF ASH: DRINK FOR THE THIRST TO COME.

I am the loneliest guy at the dance so I'll fox-trot with whoever asks. The t.i.tle story is typical of several in this collection: I was asked to write it. This one was made-to-order as part of a shared-world anthology-to-be, a collection of ten post-apocalyptic tales by ten authors.

I had worked with the editor before and he knew I was a writer for the City of Chicago. He suggested my offering might center on our city's new Emergency Management and Communications Center.

Reasonable, intriguing.

Despite being a Geek (with no Geek bona fides) I'd never had occasion to tour the EMC. I got the okay from my Commissioner and scooted over to the West Side (Chicago has no East Side) to get an insider's look at the Center. The place was intriguing, almost exciting. More than that, I cannot say. I will say the EMC is big, scary, secure-looking as you might imagine such a windowless bunker-like command and control center to be. It is state-of-the-art air-conditioned hardware humming away in darkened rooms, serviced by chilled wetware.

Homeland Security restrictions aside, however, somewhere along the tour I realized I didn't want this story to be nuts and bolts, a tale of by-the-numbers survival; I did not want to focus on beleaguered City workers bureaucratizing the end of the world. Christ, that's my daily job. By the way, in case you think nuclear holocaust will exempt you, the Feds have contingency plans for the distribution of mail and the collection of taxes in the wake of Armageddon.

In my mind, then, the EMC of my submission would be a sh.e.l.l, maybe the beginning and end-points of a quest. I like quests.

Researching the apocalypse, I came to realize the similarities between a landscape stripped to the skin by nuclear winter and the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. The photographs of what we now know as "hab.o.o.bs" and the first-person accounts of survival and death by dust from that time convinced me that something of that world had to be part of the story. By the way, for a personal look at absolutely avoidable human misery, I recommend Timothy Egan's The Worst Hard Time: the Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. I can tell you, our hero's Long Walk from Texas to Chicago would probably not be possible in conditions as described. Okay, miracles happen; that's part of what horror is: the wondrous meeting the unthinkable. Another book of immense help was Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. So too were Michihiko Hachiya's Hiroshima Diary and John Hersey's Hiroshima. For the shape and tone of Drink..., I re-read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.

The plot is a basic quest story with both victory and defeat at the end of it.

The Chicago sites are real. Johnny's IceHouse is across the way from the EMC. The Deep Tunnel, one of the largest civil engineering projects in history, is being built beneath my feet as I type. The opera house? Still there. The Turandot gong? That too. The Expressway? Still streaming. They wait.

This story's history? Until now it was a virgin, untouched by human eye. The shared-world anthology for which it was written never happened. That happens.

THANKS FOR YOUR MEMORIES: ROOT SOUP, WINTER SOUP.

At this writing Tycelia and I have been married eight years. We have known each other for a half-century. We met in an empty room in a college town in eastern Pennsylvania, dated for a short time then lost touch. Forty years on we reconnected through an article in an alumni magazine. At the time, she was teaching French in Maine and I was writing for Mayor Daley in Chicago. At first, our courtship was two chums catching up by email. We wrote every day; we shared news, thoughts, and, as boomers will, we reminisced. Tycelia is from Mississippi. Her childhood was filled with tired old places, hard folk etched with histories and memories of food. One day she mentioned she was slicing parsnip 'fingers' for a root soup.

I was off.

Where Cordelia comes from is a mystery. Without being specific, the voice of the story is southern though Cordelia could be from any place at any time. She is a woman with a past, deeply wronged, scarred by someone, left damaged to live and be a small monster in a tiny world. She lives beatifically and embraces goodness as only a true monster can. Her place in the woods is taken from a place in which a philosophy prof/friend of mine lived in the year before I went into the service. That old house in the woods was one of the most haunted places I've ever entered. See, it had been a station on the Underground Railway before the Civil War and...

d.a.m.n. I have got to do something with that place sometime. I'll say no more except: that haunted little house in the woods, that name, Cordelia, the image of chopping fingers for a root soup... That was enough.

ZOMBIES IN THE TRENCHES: WIND SHADOWS.

Again, I received an email from an editor who invited me to submit to an anthology. This time, Zombie stories. The other invitees formed an impressive list. I was honored. I'd recently been nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers a.s.sociation and, for the second time, had been beaten for the award by the same guy. That's probably why I said yes.

I've never been a fan of zombie entertainments. I'd never written a zombie story. I'd read only one zombie tale. Even zombie films (excepting Shaun of the Dead) left me, forgive me, cold. Still, it was an invitation. I had no idea what I'd do but, h.e.l.l, I had six months to do it in.

I re-watched a few Romero films, read How to Survive a Zombie Attack and some other things. Two months in, and no good ideas presented. h.e.l.l, I had four months.

What was my problem?

I don't like working the old tropes. That was my problem.

One Sunday afternoon Tycelia and I were wandering around Hyde Park, Chicago. We stepped into one the bookstores that services that rather idyllic University of Chicago neighborhood. Tycelia headed for the foreign language section. I bungled about. For no particular reason-which is the salient feature of bookstore bungling-I picked up a long, wide, and not-so-thick book called Harry's War: Experiences in the 'Suicide Club' in World War One. Harry's War is a facsimile of a self-ill.u.s.trated diary kept by a British soldier named Harry Stinton. Harry had been a so-called "bomber," a ground soldier trained in hand-grenade warfare, during the First World War. I bought and devoured it in a day.

The almost casual acceptance of violent death surrounding Private Stinton suggested a direction.

I research by immersion. It's very non-academic. I eat books, take no notes, try to catch the feel and flavor of a place, an era; I try to hear, to touch. When I can smell that world, I begin to write.

Smelling the "First War's" trenches is no fun.

The draft was more than 13 thousand words. I cut. I submitted. The story was accepted. Then, the project was delayed in favor of another book-to-be in which the editor was involved, something called A Dark and Deadly Valley, horror and dark fantasy set during World War II. He thought that since I had a feel for war stories I might have something for that one.

I did.

The zombie book was further back-burnered when the editor opted to do yet another anthology. This was to have been a shared-world work, ten authors tethered to a single universe, one in which humankind barely survives a nuclear war. He asked me to be one of the ten. My contribution to this effort eventually would be called Drink for the Thirst to Come.

The zombie book never happened. The authors retrieved their stories and groused to each other. I put Wind Shadows aside and never tried to sell it. Face it, it's too zombie for straight markets, not zombie enough for the shuffle and moan crowd. Every now and then, though, a wind blows across the fields and I run into one of the authors, ask about his or her contributions to this and other books that never were.

Now you've read my contribution.

A strange thing: until I considered it for this collection, I'd not read Wind Shadows myself. As a writer, yes, reading as I went, reading as I cut, pared, adjusted, proof-reading. But as a member of the audience? No. Interesting experience. h.e.l.l, it must be a zombie story, it was accepted into an anthology of zombie tales. Okay. It is about the dead animated by... Well, by something. It wasn't until I finished reading it that first time as an audient that I realized it's about what war does. War takes people to a place, below; it brings them to that blank wall, to themselves. The other side of which is something unseen, unseeable for most of us this side of the grave. It gives a warrior a hint of that something that lurks beneath us all. In World War I it was called sh.e.l.l-shock. Now we call it Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

My war was Vietnam. My wartime experiences were mild compared with the people I write about. Still, I could tell you stories...

ONE FROM THE ID: IN A DAINTY PLACE.

My father never went to war. I'm an only child. The "dainty place" was a lie I told my grandmother.

In a Dainty Place was the jump-off point for a novel set in the world inside the wall. The novel, still pending, is set in a medieval milieu mixed with the made-up family stories our hero tells his kid brother. The book begins in the world of the wall and In a Dainty Place is back-story, revealed as the story progresses.

I almost know where this story comes from. I am sure that in writing it I was ridding myself of something that had niggled since I was a tot. That something was the side hallway of the large old house my parents moved into when I was five. The hall was a long, dark splintery place where aged vacuum cleaners lived and where-don't ask me why-the British lay in wait for me.

Okay. Ask.

Okay, I'll tell. I could read before I went to school. Not bragging, it was an accident. My grandfather used to sit me on his lap and read to me. Stories, poetry, whatever. Granddad would read and I'd follow his finger as it touched the words. I learned that certain places his finger touched made certain sounds come from Granddad. The sounds were stories. The stories were wrapped in the words.

Granddad liked Edgar Allan Poe. At that lap-age I honestly thought poetry was so-called because Poe had written it, all of it.