Apocalypticon Read online

  He funneled a handful of pale, sort-of-brownish coffee grounds into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. The last dredges of caffeine had probably soaked through weeks ago, but the placebo effect made him feel instantly more focused. He checked his watch. 9:57. Any minute now. He hoped.

  He shoveled the wet grounds from one side of his mouth to the other with his tongue and paced over to the dining room table, a battered antique made by Annie’s great-grandfather almost one hundred years before. Darkly stained scrollwork trimmed the strong oak plinth. Patrick fingered the carefully carved rivets, tracing his fingertips around the smooth, knobby curls. For the first time ever, he actually considered the table and marveled at its presence. One hundred years old and showing no signs of weakness. It would be there long after he left. Depending on how things went with the world, it could very well be there until the end of recorded time.

  He thought of Annie, and of all the meals they’d eaten in front of the television all those years, the stupid, goddamn worthless television, when they should have gathered around this heirloom that was so much a piece of her. The blood of the man who made that table ran through Annie’s veins. It had, before the blood spilt and pooled, before it seeped out in viscous globs and dried and turned to rust, before it flaked and drifted away in the wind.

  He wiped the tears from his eyes and shook his head, forcing the image back under. He pushed up onto the tips of his toes and looked out the window. Still nothing. He looked back at his watch. 10:03. Any minute now.

  The butterscotch Snack Pack sat innocently in the center of the table. Patrick smiled and picked up the little two-pack. Butterscotch. Sure, most kids wanted chocolate, Ben had that right, and Izzy did adore chocolate. Just like her mother, she’d have eaten her own hand if it were made of chocolate. She just liked butterscotch more. She was such a weird kid, so imaginative and bizarre and confusing, and so completely, undeniably his.

  Izzy’s pudding in Patrick’s hand on Annie’s table. The gang’s all here.

  Patrick tore the cardboard holder and tossed it aside. He set one pudding cup down on the table and hefted the other. He tossed the pudding cup up and down as he paced back over to the windows. Still nothing. He checked his watch. 10:07. Any minute now. Come on.

  He turned to continue his pacing when a glint of light on the horizon caught his peripheral vision. He spun back to the window, pressing his nose against the glass. For a moment he wondered if he had imagined it, but there it was again, a sharp glint on the horizon, barely visible through the yellow cloud, but unmistakable. He pulled open the door and stepped out onto the balcony. For nearly three minutes he strained his eyes against the smog, trying to verify the moving shape, when a sharp wind from the lake ripped a hole in the cloud, and he could see it suddenly, the entire train moving slowly down the tracks a few miles away. He smiled a big, lopsided grin as the engine disappeared into the underground station.

  He ran back through the door and slammed it shut. He tore the foil cover from the pudding cup and smiled down at the smooth, creamy surface. He grabbed a spoon from the kitchen counter and plunged it into the butterscotch. Three years, four months, and thirteen days had passed since the Flying Monkey attack, and every second of that time had ticked its way down to this pudding cup. He thought maybe he should say something, so he said, “The second-to-last of many.” It sounded stupid, and he wished he had said something a little more historical, for the sake of his own personal record and the biography that he assumed Ben would probably want to write about him someday, but there was no time for revisions. He had to hurry. The train left in just twelve hours. They would need every bit of it to reach the station.

  He finished Izzy’s butterscotch in three bites.

  •

  Ben had a serious dilemma. He glanced at the oversized knapsack, crammed almost to the brim with canned food and bottled water, then over at the weapons cache, his very own carefully cultivated collection of cutlery and bludgeons.

  Decisions, decisions.

  He could carry the knife in his belt, the bat in his hand, and the machete in the bag, but then he’d have to leave the hammer and the baton behind, and both of those were light, which would make them good in a surprise attack. He might be able to fit the baton in the bag with the machete and the food, but it’d be a tight fit, if it fit at all. Or he could put the baton on his belt, if he could find the nylon case, put the knife in his pocket, and maybe carry the hammer, but then he’d have to leave either the bat or the machete behind. He could put the machete in the bag and carry both the hammer and the bat, but the proportions were all wrong, it’d make him feel stupid. He could switch out the hammer for the machete, since the machete and the bat were roughly the same size, but then he’d have one weapon in each hand that really required two hands to use it effectively, so that’d be pointless, and, besides, he was liable to cut his own leg off walking like that. The stupid machete was sharp. He could leave the machete and put the bat in the bag, or maybe put the hammer in the bag and carry the bat, but then he’d have all blunt weapons, except for the knife, which was handy, but too small to really be useful for large, fast-moving targets, and you never knew when you’d come across a mutant bear. He could leave the bat behind, since he’d always kind of swung like a girl anyway, but something about the idea of a blood-spattered bat really spoke to him, probably due to all the B-movie horror flicks he’d watched in the break room years ago as a Blockbuster clerk, and, besides, what if he found a huge spike lying on the ground somewhere? He’d definitely want a bat to drive it through, Warriors-style. But it didn’t make sense to leave the hammer, the knife, or the baton behind, seeing as how they didn’t take up a whole lot of room. What if he carried both the baton and the hammer on his belt? Then he could put the knife in his pocket, the machete in the bag, and the bat in his hand. Perfect! It was settled.

  Then he remembered the pipe wrench. Oh dammit, the pipe wrench! How could he forget? He couldn’t leave the pipe wrench! He’d been sitting on a great Clue joke for months now, just itching for a chance to say it after braining someone with the wrench. He had to bring it. But, damn, it was heavy and pretty bulky. He’d have to sacrifice the bat and carry the wrench. Or maybe tie it to his belt, but three weapons down there would get heavy, and they’d probably make his pants sag, which would make it impossible to run like hell if any of the weapons failed. He could leave the machete, but dammit, no, never mind, he couldn’t leave the machete; he’d already been over this.

  He felt like crying. Shit, he thought. The apocalypse is hard.

  He had just decided to dump out all the food and stuff the bag full of weapons when someone knocked at the door. Three hard knocks. Ben froze.

  “Ben, it’s me,” Patrick called from the hall. “Can I come in?”

  Ben stood rooted to the floor and listened. It didn’t sound like there was anyone else out in the hall with him, but, hell, the apartment door was 24-gauge with a steel frame and ultra-high-density foam insulation. Who knows what he wasn’t hearing out there?

  What he was hearing was Patrick muttering a muffled string of expletives. There was a loud thud near the bottom of the door (a kick, probably). Then, with no small amount of perverse delight, he heard the sequence begin...

  Three hard knocks, two soft knocks, one long knock, three short knocks, two and a quarter rapid-fire knocks, one flat palm slap, four knuckle taps, another palm slap, seven knuckle taps, two long knocks, seven left hand-right hand alternating slap-pounds, three short knocks, one knuckle tap, two palm slaps, three hard knocks, two soft knocks, four hard knocks, one rippling knuckle tap, two palm slaps.

  Ben double-checked the sequence against the sheet tacked up by the door. His jaw fell open in surprise. Holy shit, he got it right. Ben shrugged and reached for the top chain lock, but stopped short. He leaned back over to the code sheet and looked at the date at the top. Huh, he thought. “Sorry,”
he called through the door. “That was last week’s code.”

  This time, the string of curses was not muffled.

  “Ben, if you don’t open this door, I will leave you here to die alone, I swear to God. And I will not give you the rights to my biography.”

  Against his better judgment, Ben threw back the series of locks and cracked open the door. Patrick’s face burned a deep crimson. He’d never seen the poor guy so angry. “What makes you think I want to write your biography?”

  “Don’t act like you don’t.” Patrick pushed the door open and stepped inside. “If you don’t knock off this Knock Code nonsense, I’ll have no choice but to—oooo, weapons!” he cried, pointing at the arsenal splayed out on the living room floor. “Bemme. Bemme! Bemme weapons,” he said, making quick open-and-closed grabby hands.

  “Are you speaking a language?” Ben asked.

  “Bemme!” Patrick pointed frantically at the pipe wrench. Ben shook his head, but picked it up and handed it to his gaunt friend. “Ooooo! Pipe wrench!” Patrick swung the heavy tool wildly, freezing in various (and completely off-balance) ninja poses. “Yes! I like this. This shall be my wrench, and I shall call him Rusty.” He swung it around his head, and the weight of the wrench carried him straight back into the wall. The head blasted right through the drywall. “It works!” Patrick cried.

  “Okay, two things,” Ben said, swiping the wrench out of Patrick’s hand. “One, the wrench is mine. Two, everything here is mine.”

  “Aww, come on! All I have is a putter. Holy cats!” he cried, eyes bulging. “Is that an extendable baton?”

  “Yeah. It is. Don’t touch it.”

  “Where did you get that?!”

  “The U-Spy Store.”

  Patrick gasped. “At Fullerton and Western?”

  “Yep.”

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  “You went to the U-Spy Store without me?!”

  “Yeah. I did.”

  “Unbelievable! When did you go all the way to Logan Square?”

  “Last year, in the fall.”

  “What the hell! Where was I? Why didn’t I get to go? I love the U-Spy Store! I introduced you to the U-Spy Store!” And then once again, for good measure, “I love the U-Spy Store!”

  Ben shrugged. “You were off on one of your dumb pudding hunts. Er, wait, no,” he said, thinking. “That wasn’t a pudding day. That was a food-to-pudding calculation day. You stayed inside all day and did math.”

  “Oh, don’t you dare hold math against me, don’t you dare! I had to maintain a very specific food-to-pudding ratio to get the timing to work out for us, involving an extremely precise algorithm, and the whole formula was constantly in flux because I kept finding more pudding, you know that. You know that!” Patrick crossed his arms and huffed.

  “Oh, don’t be a baby,” Ben said, slapping Patrick on the arm. “If it helps, I almost died.”

  “That does not help. It only makes it more exciting!” Patrick cried.

  “Yeah, that’s true. It was pretty bad ass. We got jumped by this band of hipsters at the Milwaukee-Damen six-point.”

  “Who’s we?” Patrick cried.

  “Me and Harold, the guy from 3B.”

  “You brought the guy from 3B?! You didn’t bring me, but you brought the guy from 3B?!”

  “Don’t get too excited. He got shot in the face.”

  Patrick gasped. “The guy from 3B got shot in the face?”

  “Right in the face.”

  He shook his head in awe. “I always wondered what happened to the guy in 3B.”

  Ben nodded. “Shot in the face. So, really, I saved your life by not taking you. You’re welcome.”

  “You are a true friend.”

  “It was pretty crazy. He got shot by the ringleader. The fucking kid was trying to fire a warning shot in the air, but he was too damn lazy to lift the gun all the way.”

  Patrick scoffed. “Goddamn hipsters.”

  “Right?”

  Patrick sat down on the floor and crossed his legs, completely enraptured, forgetting momentarily about the exciting weapons just to his left. “How’d you get away?”

  “Oh, the one guy totally lost his shit when he shot Harold. He just sat down and started crying in the middle of the street. I took off, and a couple of the guys chased me, but one guy’s jeans were so tight he couldn’t lift his stupid legs, and the other one got his summer scarf caught on a piece of scaffolding.”

  “Fucking hipsters,” Patrick said.

  “Fucking hipsters,” Ben agreed.

  “It’s amazing to me that they’ve survived this long.”

  “Not me,” said Ben. “Makes total sense. They don’t eat anything, they don’t get physical, and they always travel in herds.”

  “So you’re saying the hipster is the post-apocalyptic cockroach.”

  “I’m saying the hipster is every era’s cockroach.”

  “Fair.” Patrick rocked back and forth slowly on his tailbone, trying to remember what he had come to tell Ben in the first place. “Oh! Right! We have to hurry.” He leapt up and dusted himself off. “Our carriage awaits. How’s the food?”

  “It’s good. I was just about to dump it all out.”

  Patrick frowned. “Out?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Out.”

  “What, like...out of the bag?”

  “Yeah, Patrick, out of the bag.” He picked up the knapsack and turned it over, dumping the contents onto the floor. Patrick watched, horrified.

  “No, you clod!” he yelled. “The food goes in the bag!”

  “I’m making room for the pipe wrench!”

  Patrick smacked his palm against his forehead. “No, see, this is exactly why I’m in charge. We need food to survive. We do not need the pipe wrench to survive. A pipe wrench is cool...it’s very, very cool, I’m the first to admit, and if Grand Theft Auto has taught me anything, it’s that cool weapons are extremely important in gratuitously violent situations...but we don’t need it. Now. I applaud your enthusiasm for carnage, but, please, put the food back in the bag, and we’ll take only the weapons we can carry.”

  Ben looked hopelessly at the metal cans strewn about the floor. He sighed. “Yeah, you’re right. I’m sorry. I just had, like, The Warriors playing on loop in my head, and it all just looked so cool, you know, the bat with the wrench and the machete sticking out of the bag, but yeah. Okay. We’ll bring the food. I’m sorry.” He began scrambling after the cans and stuffing them back in the bag.

  “It’s okay, Benny Boy. We all get excited about The Warriors. But you do need to be punished, so I’ll be taking the baton. And the hammer.” He hefted both, one in each hand, and swung them crazily through the air. “Yes, these will do nicely.” He stuck them in his back pockets. “Think you’ll be ready to go in twenty?”

  “Sure,” Ben said, slipping the wrench into the knapsack and zipping it shut. “Hey, which do you think looks better?” he asked, grabbing the machete with his left hand and the bat with his right. He held them out in a defensive stance.

  “You’ll kill us all if you use the machete. Bring the bat.”

  Ben frowned. “Well someone should bring the machete,” he said.

  “True,” Patrick mused. “It may be useful for cutting our way through jungles and murderers.”

  “You want to carry it?” Ben asked, holding it out, blade-first.

  “Good Lord, no, not like that,” Patrick said, raising his hands and taking two steps back. “I’d be an amputee in three minutes flat. But I do have an idea.” He tapped a finger knowingly to his nose. “You leave it to me. I’ll be back here in twenty minutes, and we’re off.”

  •

  Patrick stalked through the rooms of his condo, a living sh
ade among memory ghosts. Here, in Izzy’s room, an angry, pink baby the size of his left hand once screamed and screamed, her fists clenched in newborn rage. There, in the laundry room, was where Annie used to slap his hand and say, “Get out of here! Let me do this. You’ll turn our clothes pink and midgety.” He walked through the living room, past Izzy’s coloring table, where she had held up so many proud drawings and explained; “This is Mommy, this is Daddy, this is Elvis, this is me.” He passed the kitchen, where Annie stirred a boiling pot and sang softly to the baby in her belly, Well we got no class, and we got no principles, and we got no innocence, we can’t even think of a word that rhymes. He peered into the office. Just after they moved in, he’d caught Annie hanging a Bruce Campbell-signed Bubba Ho-Tep poster over his computer. She’d huffed at him, pretending to be mad. It was supposed to be a surprise. The poster was still there.

  He sat down at the desk and pulled open the top drawer. Inside, resting on a mess of pens, stamps, and rubber bands, sat a small, folded piece of paper. It had yellowed slightly with age and with the oils from Patrick’s hands. He lifted it out of the drawer and unfolded it gingerly, careful not to tear the sharply creased folds. The writing was barely legible after all this time, but he could have recited the entire thing by heart. He traced his fingers over the words thoughtfully, then re-folded the paper for the millionth time and slipped it into his front pocket.