Luca looked in the window. The lights were on, like most of the houses for the last few blocks. A purr at his feet pulled Luca’s attention to Champion, the coach’s cat, rubbing itself on his ankle.
Champion felt weird just like Lucky had. Comparing the two led Luca to realize that besides Lucky and Champion, he hadn’t seen a single animal since waking. Which was weird since some dog in the neighborhood was always barking.
All Luca wanted was someone to explain what was happening. Like his dad always did. In simple sentences that would be easy to understand. But no one was around, and after following the rainbow 17 blocks to the coach’s house and not seeing anyone, Luca felt the sad spiders start to crawl inside him. His mom could usually get them to leave with tickles, or the promise of a salami sandwich. But his mom wasn’t there to make him a sandwich any more than his dad was standing by with an explanation.
Luca leaned against the door, slid to his bottom, put his face in his palm and cried. He tried rubbing the headache from his head but the headache said no. A dog cried out from somewhere in the distance. Luca was glad to hear it.
He felt a sudden icy chill beneath his burning skin, but shrugged it off and stood.
Luca looked around the neighborhood. White spots were everywhere, but he looked past them to get a good look at the brand new rainbow. It was telling him to listen to the trees. And though Luca was old enough to know that trees couldn’t talk, they did seem to be whispering something or other.
Trees aren’t supposed to talk, but they keep telling me to follow the wind. And the wind won’t stop talking about the water. I think they like the place we go each summer, the beach in Mexico where the man makes the lobster tacos.
Mexico it was. And it made perfect sense. His parents were probably there at the small house already – that’s what the rainbow said. And rainbows were too colorful to lie.
Luca didn’t know how to drive, but he did know a car was better than walking. He would’ve gone back to his house, but his dad’s truck was way too big and his mom’s car was a stick shift she’d had since her 20s. He definitely didn’t think he could drive that.
One of the cars in Coach’s collection was a red Porsche that looked like a bathtub. Luca had ridden in it before. It was parked on the street and he needed it, so Coach Michael would understand if he took it. His mom said that in emergencies, like when you’re bleeding or vomiting, there were special rules. Luca wasn’t bleeding or vomiting, but he was definitely having the biggest emergency of his life.
Luca looked but couldn’t find any keys. They weren’t in any of the cars, even though people in movies found them tucked inside the thing you use to keep the sun from getting in your eyes. Then, he tried Coach’s door and was surprised to find it unlocked. He went inside and called for Coach, but nobody answered. Luca started searching for the keys.
He looked for over an hour, until his skin was burning and head pounding enough to make him stop. He was about to walk back home when he heard a meow coming from the kitchen. He went to the kitchen where Champion sat beside the cooking island, patting his paws against the wood.
Luca walked straight to the drawer above Champion’s head, slid it open, and removed a small, rectangular cobalt blue box with three keys inside. He removed the middle key, because it was the one that worked in the small Porsche that looked like a bathtub. Luca knew it, just as he knew what was in the box as soon as the cat told him.
**
Even though they were supposed to have sticks in the middle like his mom’s car, the coach’s Porsche didn’t. That was because it was a model car for grown-ups. And it wasn’t as old as it looked. Coach said it was a replica. It had a Volkswagen engine and an auto something transmission. He said that even though it was all sizzle and no steak, he loved driving it just the same.
Luca opened the door, sat behind the wheel, turned the engine, and scooted down until his foot was on the brake. He put the car in drive and moved his foot to the gas. The Porsche lurched forward and threw Luca against the seat. He had to scurry down to hit the brake before the car rolled too far.
He tried a few versions of the same thing several times before realizing that though he was big enough to ride in the Porsche, he wasn’t yet tall enough to drive it.
He returned to the house and ran upstairs to Matthew’s room. Matthew had more Legos than anyone Luca knew. He pulled the largest bucket from Lego Island, the one with all the odds and ends and oversized pieces. For five minutes, he didn’t think about burny skin or white spots in the sky or rainbows. For five minutes, he did nothing but stack legos, wearing a rare smile for that morning, on a face that usually looked naked without one.
Once he had created two neat cubes about 15 bricks high, Luca went to Matthew’s closet and grabbed a pair of shoes, size 12, same as him. He used duct tape from the garage to tape the two cubes to the bottom of Matthew’s shoes. He put them on and smiled.
Luca climbed into the car and drove toward the end of the smaller rainbow at a comfortable 20 mph. He was a robot, with super cool handmade ninja robot feet.
**
He drove slow but exactly where the rainbow told him, winding down the hill until he hit a mostly empty Pacific Coast Highway where he made a left. Luca wove through the occasionally idle traffic as if playing a slowed down PS3 game with his daddy.
He had driven for three hours and 41 miles when he noticed the animals. At first, it was just a cat or two, then three. The math got harder as he drove, and by the third hour Luca was noticing all sorts of animals trotting along both sides of the highway.
Like animals that aren’t really animals anymore.
BAM!!!
Luca was lost in thought when he smashed the back of a pitch-black truck dead on the highway. Luca hadn’t seen a car for two miles, just long enough to send his attention elsewhere.
The empty hood of the bathtub crinkled like paper and threw Luca back hard against his seat and out cold on impact. The last thing he sensed as he slipped into darkness was the fire, not on his skin, but starting in the back of the car.
* * * *
BORICIO WOLFE
Saturday
October 15, 2011
1:17 a.m.
New Orleans, Louisiana
There were no explosions. No crashing concrete, crackling electricity, or menacing reverb to blanket the city. No screams. Just that hollow pause that sits in the seconds between ignition and detonation.
Except this one came and never left.
Boricio woke a second after It started, wide awake even though he’d been tangled in a fat thick of sleep — the kind you get after a night spent doing all the things he’d just finished doing. He wasn’t sure how he knew the end had begun. He just knew.
His feet hit the floor and felt colder than they should have. That didn’t bother him. At least not like the air. Stale. Though he could still smell the restaurant below, there were no sounds. And there were always fucking sounds.
This is some beer-battered bullshit.
Boricio looked around the loft — nothing out of place, at least not that he could put his finger on. Just the smell that didn’t smell right and the crazy feeling of empty that seemed to swallow the entire apartment like the fat lips on a French Quarter whore.
And the crazy as a cat on crack dream.
Boricio looked outside. Sky wasn’t right.
He opened the window, and yup, same beer-battered bullshit outside, but stronger. He didn’t bother to shut the window, heading outside and grabbing a beer from the fridge on the way out instead. The fridge was still cold, though it’d gone as dark as the always-blinking alarm. Boricio stepped into the hallway and grabbed the time from the beat-to-shit clock with the three missing Romans — 2:17 am.
Fuck that.
Boricio hit the bottom stair and opened the door. He could smell the beer-battered bullshit before it was halfway open. Yup, the restaurant was dead. The restaurant hadn’t been empty once in the four months he l
ived upstairs, but Boricio could see through the glass: No cooks, no customers, no servers. He walked outside into the night.
And on the corner, Lucy was gone, which was equally weird. Lucy was never gone. Fucking mystery when she slept; stood on the corner day in, day out, except if cops were on the beat or she was filling the mayonnaise jar. Even then, she was only gone for five to nine minutes at a time. Lucy had a way of taking guys into the room and giving them more than they expected in less than a quarter of the time.
Like his apartment, the motel across the street was dark. But the humming light from the restaurant’s sign (which was lit) illuminated the split crack of Room #112. Boricio crossed the street, then opened the door the rest of the way to a whole mess of what-the-fuck?
The room was neat. Ready for the next 5–9 minutes neat anyway. And the air was so cold, it wasn’t like Lucy had stepped out so much as she’d never even been there. Boricio had smelled that room most days ending in Y for four months straight and it had never smelled like that.
The motel room was dead. Just like the alley. And the stairwell. And his fucking apartment. And just like that, the restaurant sign went dark, the humming ceased, leaving everything quiet. Like no animals or insects quiet. The kinda quiet you sometimes got right before a hurricane, but even quieter.
A flirt’s worth of fear fluttered through Boricio’s body. It almost made him smile; it’d been so long since he’d felt it, but his beading temple kept the grimace fixed. Boricio stepped back into the alley, drawing a deep breath and inhaling a perfumed gust from the Mississippi.
The river.
Fuck yeah, that’s where he’d go. Something had happened and he’d missed it. People were evacuating and would have to meet in one place. The river made sense. Besides, if it really was the end of the world, the Mississippi would look him in the eye and tell him the truth.
Boricio crossed the street, hopped in his 10-year-old, 2-ton Ford, then gunned the engine and tore into the street with a roar thundering over dead earth. He was only a half mile from the river but didn’t even make it a block before braking hard enough to burn his nostrils with the scent of burned rubber.
FUCK.
Maybe the world had been shingled in shit and maybe it hadn’t, but a sudden memory from his previous night’s adventure filled Boricio’s brain with a planet and a half’s worth of fuck this!
The world had disappeared. The thought of her disappearing, despite the neat slit that ran beneath her chin from ear to ear, was about as much as Boricio could take. He flipped the pickup in a U and sent it flying toward the Village de L’Est where that little bitch Brianna had kept her tidy apartment, at least until he’d made her breathing impossible.
He’d see if the body was still there. If so, he’d deal with it.
Him, too.
**
Boricio coated the back of his hand with brow sweat and pushed the pickup harder. Less than a mile to go.
Fucking bitch. I wanted to wait until Christmas. She was my present. And if it wasn’t for that ancient fuck, or the punk ass with the pink glasses, I would’ve. Still, she’d been yummier’n a Hurricane and a heap of hot wings. Didn’t even scream. Not once. Just wheezed at the end a little, like a dying vacuum cleaner.
Boricio broke into a cracked laugh at the memory.
Punk ass with the sunglasses, though, he cried like a stuck pig. Would’ve died fast no matter, but the squealing made it easy. She was worth savoring every second. Too bad about the rush. Happy fucking Halloween.
Now I need something new for Christmas.
Boricio rounded the corner at Dauphine and killed the engine at the second curb so he could walk the rest of the way. Like always. Just in case. From a block back, he knew everything he needed to, but kept on going anyway. The old man, same fucker who had been sitting on the stoop since early September when Boricio first started scoping the place, was gone. He’d been half the reason Boricio had to hurry his Christmas, and now he wasn’t even around to celebrate the end of the world.
The door to the apartment was unlocked just as he left it. He could almost smell her as he crossed the apartment toward the bathroom where his first surprise was waiting. Boricio had left precisely one body in the bathtub with all its limbs in place. He’d even left the head on since an extra body was all the cops needed to open-and-shut his ritual into an easy-to-swallow murder-suicide.
The punk ass dude had bled out, coating the tub in a thick mottle of red, but his body was gone and the gallons of blood looked like they’d been replaced with fresh water.
The fuck is this?
And she was missing too.
The bed was rumpled from where she’d been taking her final nap, but the buckets of blood that were beneath her when Boricio closed the door three hours earlier, now looked suspiciously like bleach stains. Same for the drops leading from bed to bathroom. The white against the brown of the hard wood was clear, even with only one light working.
Someone turned the world inside-fucking-out...
Boricio tore through the apartment, trying to pull sense from the impossible. He wasn’t worried about getting caught at all. It hadn’t happened in 20 years and sure as shit wasn’t about to happen an hour into the Apocalypse, but he wasn’t a guy to flip a bitch on Answer Road.
After 15 minutes, Boricio couldn’t find a single thing, except for the panty drawer he’d rifled through 73 times before.
Those aren’t her panties. Ain’t a single pair in that drawer was ever worn.
Thing about beer-battered bullshit is it doesn’t taste different until you spit it out, so Boricio threw a final scowl around the room, then headed for the door, pausing at the threshold. He could swear he felt faster, stronger. And not just like he usually did after a good kill and a great night’s sleep.
Like a few lines of coke gone permanent. Must be the adrenaline. Feels good. Could get used to this shit in a hurry.
Boricio bounded down the stairs and kicked the door with a giggle. Maybe it was the end of the world, and maybe that shit wasn’t too bad. Humanity was mostly made of assholes anyway, and that was scientific fucking fact.
Boricio was practically skipping across the street, but broke into a full run when he saw the police cruiser sitting in the ghost lot of a usually hopping Circle K.
The meek don’t inherit shit. Earth belongs to the wolves.
* * * *
EDWARD KEENAN
Darkness bathed every block.
Not a single light or car on the street. Nor a single person in sight.
The shit was downright spooky. He followed the streets until they led him out of the neighborhood and into town, wherever the hell he was. He didn’t think to look at an address while in the house. That was the second mistake he’d made this evening. He’d have to stay sharp if he planned to get back home. He was about to lean over, open the glove compartment, and dig out whatever paperwork was in there, when he saw the glow of lights from a gas station’s lit canopy ahead.
Excited, he floored the gas, and raced to the station. A red Honda was parked at the pump and a blue Mazda was parked in a space at the back of the store.
The gas station was in the lot of a small shopping plaza, which had gone completely dark. As he got closer to the gas station, he looked inside the store. It was lit, but dimly. Backup lighting, no doubt.
Ed parked behind the Honda, hopped out of the SUV, and went inside the store, which was haunted by the same vacant feeling of the oddly abandoned house.
“Hello?” No cashier at the register; no one in the store. He walked towards the walk-in cooler, which was muted from its usual hum, and peered inside the window. Nobody in there, either.
He headed to the back of the store, checked the bathrooms and a back storage room, doubling as an office. He saw a closed-circuit TV, its broadcast dark. He was about to leave the back room when he spotted something on the desk — a phone! And not one of those wireless fuckers, but a landline.
; His heart leaped in his chest. He raised the receiver to his ear, heart beating faster and excited fingers ready to dance the 11 digits on their way to Xavier.
Except he heard no dial tone.
He clicked the disconnect a few times, nothing in return. The line was as dead as the lights. It didn’t make sense. Even during a total power outage, phone lines had enough power to make calls. Perhaps, he considered, the phone company’s power was out?
Nope, they’d have backup generators up the ass and back. Something is definitely sideways.
The voice in his head told him to get the hell out of the store and back on the road. Because at this hour only stoners with the munchies and cops frequented gas stations. He needed to find a highway and head to Florida, A-fucking-SAP. First, though, he had to figure out where he was. A newspaper rack at the front counter spilled the beans – he was in Ohio. Made sense given the girl’s sweater in the photo.
He grabbed a five-pound spiral book that included a map of the United States. He glanced around the station, then outside again. Still no signs of another soul. He went behind the counter and approached the register. It ran on power, and was off, but when he twisted a key in the bottom, the drawer sprang open. Inside the drawer he found four stacks of bills, from 20’s to singles. He grabbed them all, shoved them in his pocket, figured there was about $250 total. He was about to leave, when he spotted a black backpack nudged in the corner, probably belonging to the missing cashier. He glanced around again, then retrieved the bag. There it was — a Smith and Wesson 9mm.
Automatic in a holster.
He was surprised to find such a decent gun just laying out in the open.
Ed grabbed the backpack, a few snacks and drinks for the road, and got back in the SUV. He was about to reverse, when he realized the Honda was gone.
What the fuck? It must’ve left while I was in the back of the store.
He spun around, scanning the parking lot and the street. No sign of the car. He glanced back to the parking lot behind the station. The blue car was still there, seemingly empty. He didn’t know what was happening, but knew enough to know Ohio was creeping him the fuck out. He had to bail. Now.