The Apocalypse Reader Part 2

He picked us up. He was incredibly strong. I could feel his muscles cradling me. I must have weighed no more than eighty pounds. The others looked like dolls with their dull skin and gigantic glistening eyes. I had the feeling that we were being harvested, like livestock, that we were being driven out of the pasture of our apartment and would soon be on our way to some horrible slaughterhouse. Sven Ronsen carried us all downstairs and loaded us into a small wooden cart. He took Lionel's samurai sword and strapped it to his back. He grabbed the cart's rusted ball joint with his bare hands and pulled us down the road.

The streets were filled with trash and bones picked clean. The city smelled like it had died and been taken over by a powerful fungus. Sven Ronsen pulled us into an alleyway, opened a door, and wheeled us down a ramp into the bas.e.m.e.nt of a barricaded health food store. There were half a dozen others inside, organizing shelves and taking inventory.

"Idiot!" someone screamed out. "You cannot bring more people, s.h.i.+thead!"

"These are the beautiful people," said Sven Ronsen. "We have plenty of food."

"I will not tolerate it," the man said. He walked over and slapped Sven Ronsen hard across the face. Sven Ronsen stood stunned. Then he reached back and drew out Lionel's sword and brought it down in a casual onehanded style. It was odd how the blade neatly clipped off the Frenchman's ear, then sank an inch or so into his shoulder. Sven Ronsen looked over at us.

"I won't let you guys down," he said. "Ever."

We didn't have the strength to respond. Sven Ronsen walked through the aisles swinging his blade, separating heads from necks. The sword edge followed on through his targets and split open pill bottles and boxes of medicinal powder, filling the store with an earth-tone confetti and lending a celebratory air to the ma.s.sacre. The whoos.h.i.+ng of the blade was crisp. Occasionally it would clank off a metal display rack, gonging away.

"I feel great," Sven Ronsen said as he slipped his swordpoint into the belly of a belching, mustachioed Asian.

When the room had been cleared, Sven Ronsen looked over at us, panting, his chest smeared with blood.

"Oh," he said. "I forgot you guys were here."

WE WERE IN the health food store for many months. We ate vitamins and granola bars, soy milk and vegetarian jerky. No one went outside except Sven Ronsen, who would sometimes return with board games and fancy clothes.

One day we heard a terrible rumbling, and a great cloud of dust came billowing into the store. We waved the chalky air from our eyes and saw that our only exit was buried under mounds of red brick.

Sven Ronsen looked at the blockaded exit. "Let's get to work and clear the way."

The process took a couple of weeks. When we went outside, everything was silent, not even a bird in the sky. Sven Ronsen said that nothing was wrong. He said that if the Earth was suddenly quiet and still it was because we were entering a new Silent Age. He said the Earth was always right, that we must adapt to her ways. When I asked Claudia what she thought she said, "We are no longer on the planet Earth."

HARRIET BECAME SVEN Ronsen's girlfriend. They'd go to the back room, what used to be the manager's office, and Sven Ronsen would pull down his jeans while Harriet went to her knees. One day Lionel told them he knew what they were doing in there. Their response was to perform the same act, at all hours, whenever the mood struck them, in full view of everyone.

"Sven Ronsen is a moron," said Lionel. "She's sucking the protein right out of him. He won't last."

I wasn't so sure, but Sven Ronsen did, in fact, grow weak. He became listless, his movements syrupy. Sometimes he would open his mouth, as if to begin speaking, but no words would come out and he would stand there like that, looking around as if nothing was unusual.

While Sven Ronsen went fallow, Harriet became strong and took over our little group. It was her idea to move into the Odeon.

It was a large stone building with a colonnade. Inside was a grand hall filled with Doric columns and s.h.i.+ning black and white tiles that led to a rotunda supported by caryatids and sphinges. The auditorium was circular with multiple balconies. The stage was enormous, a hundred flylines imitating sea rope. The seats were immaculate and comfortable. All of these beautiful things were installed-I learned from a book in the gift shop at the request of Napoleon after a terrible fire in 1799.

Sven Ronsen was now weak and thin. He spent all day lying down while Harriet sucked the life out of him. He was delirious, but Harriet just kept working away. She had begun a morning exercise routine and she lifted weights. Her biceps kept growing and soon she was pus.h.i.+ng all of us around.

"Maybe you should leave him alone today," I said to her once. Sven Ronsen had become a skeletal fool, quivering in the corners of the theater.

"I know what's best for him," Harriet said.

When I gave her a look she socked me in the mouth. Harriet was stronger than all of us.

BY THE TIME Sven Ronsen pa.s.sed away we had ama.s.sed a giant chest full of jewels. Rare stones had become completely devalued when the sun went bad, but we kept stockpiling them for some reason. It was hard to grasp the idea that they were worthless.

We decided to drop Sven Ronsen into the Seine, but Lionel could imagine how rough it would look: a couple of us heaving a body over the edge, the thing landing with a splash in the shallows, perhaps a foot sticking up out of the muck. So we built a long plastic slide that would slip the body out into the middle of the river and we dressed Sven Ronsen in a fine Italian suit from one of the designer shops on the rue du Fauborg Saint-Honore. We looped diamond necklaces around him so that he shone like a giant brooch. Sven Ronsen's body slipped like a frozen turkey down the slide and shot into the air. It hit the river dead center and vanished.

I realized any one of us could be next. Lionel's cheeks were sinking into his face, slowly revealing the shape of his skull. My pants had long ceased to fit and yet I insisted on wearing them, cinching my belt tighter and tighter, finally punching new holes into the leather so that the extra length hung off my hip, long and ridiculous, like a brown snake. It could have been any one of us. It could have been Claudia, though she seemed to be in good health. One night she grabbed me by the hand and took me to a balcony and ran her fingers over my bony body. She kissed me lightly on the neck and cried above me, our noses touching, so that her brilliant tears dripped into my dull pupils.

Among the items we scavenged when Claudia began to swoon: Spray adhesive, sapphires, safari outfits, and a jumbo pack of disposable razors. Lionel and I had never been fans of sculpted facial hair, but the demands of our production asked that we rise above our bias.

AU REVOIR, CLAUDIA.

THE SCENE:.

Sun rises. A jungle. An impeccably dressed explorer (Lionel) is s.h.i.+ning his boots. His sideburns extend to his jaw line. He whistles a light-hearted tune. His camp is clean. On a spit above an expired fire, the carca.s.s of last night's meal, a wild boar. A few feet away lies the explorer's stunning wife (Claudia). She is weak, stricken with some deadly, yet beautiful, jungle disease. Her left arm has already succ.u.mbed, covered from elbow to fingertips in glimmering sapphires. Soon she will be nothing but s.h.i.+ning stone.

EXPLORER.

Worry not, sweet wife, the cure is on the way.

WIFE.

I'm unsure that I will last.

EXPLORER.

Look yonder, our scout approaches.

Tucker (Me) arrives with a vial of b.u.t.terscotch-colored liquid. He kneels beside the explorer's wife.

EXPLORER.

Ah, just in time. Apply the remedy. We must prepare for a feast with the natives this evening. We are the guests of honor, in recognition of my wife's fine aim with a rifle. She was able to eliminate a tiger that had menaced the tribe for many years and- TUCKER.

She's f.u.c.king dead, Lionel.

EXPLORER.

Don't break character.

END.

Lionel woke up one morning with Harriet looming over him, zipping up his pants, her breath hot and seedy. They exchanged a look but nothing more. Later that afternoon Lionel had a flash memory of his uncle's house in the country and of the vintage fruit preserves collection his uncle kept in a vast cellar.

On a dewy morning Lionel and I left for St. Germain-en-Laye. We arrived, much later, at a quaint country house. Lionel's uncle sat dead on a kitchen chair. His arms were crossed, his milky eyes stared at us in disappointment, it seemed. Lionel did not cry. We were beyond such things.

In the bas.e.m.e.nt we found the preserves collection: rows of rough-hewn wooden shelves that held thousands of jars of jam. Some were pet.i.te vessels with barely an ounce inside; others were as large as footb.a.l.l.s, made of heavy green gla.s.s. Each batch was labeled in a careful hand: Ca.s.sis 1990; Fraises et Framboises 1965; Griotte 1981. We ate three jars each. The sugar exploded in my mouth. It made my fillings tingle.

"We will not tell Harriet," said Lionel, licking his teeth. "She would have us launched off the death chute by now. Our supplies are running low and soon she will starve. We must be strong and show no mercy."

We shook hands. We agreed to take only a duffel bag of jam back to Paris. We would hide it in a secret location and eat it only when we were sure Harriet was not around.

HARRIET WOULD GO out early in the morning, scavenging for food. She never found a sc.r.a.p, and slowly, she wasted away. For awhile, it seemed as though her huge biceps would not give, but then, they too faltered. She went gaunt. Lionel and I weren't much better, but the jam at least gave us energy.

HARRIET COLLAPSED TO the stage floor. "That's it for me," she said.

She lay there for days, but never once did her eyes close. A couple of times I went to check if she was still breathing. "Get the h.e.l.l away from me, lecher!" she'd say.

But soon she became like an infant, babbling and singing strange songs. She cried sometimes, then licked at her tears, desperate for salt.

She wouldn't die. It became painful to see her, so I was relieved when one night I woke up to find Lionel spoon-feeding her a late-eighties marmalade.

"I have broken the pact," he said to me. "In the morning you will execute me."

"Of course not," I said.

"We have done something terribly wrong," Lionel said.

I looked down at Harriet and could see that she was gone. A dollop of orange marmalade stuck to her stiff blue tongue.

THE BALLAD OF HARRIET.

THE SCENE:.

The Unimpeachable G.o.ddess (Harriet) is flying high up in the clouds with giant wings made of fine cashmere. She is draped in jewelry and she s.h.i.+mmers in the morning light. In her arms she cradles the skeleton of a puppy. She carries a banner that reads "For G.o.d's Sake Don't Put Me On "That Stupid f.u.c.king Slide."

THE UNIMPEACHABLE G.o.dDESS.

(Stares angrily into the audience, but does not say a word) END.

We are in some endless office building in the sixteenth arrondiss.e.m.e.nt. Lionel has his mallets going and I'm zinging pencils at a metal filing cabinet. Then the gla.s.s stops shattering and I hear Lionel say, "You must come here and look at this." It's a memo about a Bastille Day celebration.

We ride our bicycles to a storage facility at the edge of the city. It takes a while to pry the lock open. Inside we find crates labeled "Cla.s.s B Fireworks." Next to the crates are a giant switchboard and a generator full of diesel fuel. We load everything into the trailer and move it back to the Odeon.

We build a c.o.c.kpit out of plywood and mount the switchboard inside to serve as our control panel. Lionel unpacks the fireworks. We connect the igniters with xlr cable and distribute the charges to various places in the theater. We put Blue Thunder, 1000's of Silver Coconut, and Brocade Crown in the balcony. Gold Willow and Chrysanthemum with Blue Pistil go in the stage boxes. Along the flies we attach White Tiger Tail roman candles and we stuff the stage manager's desk full of Dragon Eggs with Thunder canister sh.e.l.ls. We attach the biggest charges, Fire G.o.d and Rising Twinkling Tail to Red Gamboge to Twinkling Chrysanthemum, along with four sticks of dynamite we found in Sven Ronsen's old room, to the s.p.a.ce beneath our c.o.c.kpit's flight chairs. We aim the Crackling Royal Ceiling Lamps and Watercolor Glitter aerial sh.e.l.ls at the stage curtains. We rub everything down in diesel fuel.

GRAND FINALE.

THE SCENE:.

Cape Canaveral, Florida. Morning. Two astronauts prepare for liftoff. Rex (Lionel) is an ace pilot. Sebastian (Me) is a scientist testing the effects of antigravity on a jar of premium vintage fruit spread.

REX.

(hands at the switchboard) Ten seconds to liftoff. You ready for this?

SEBASTIAN.

You bet.

Sebastian opens the jam jar and sticks his nose within. He inhales flavors of mint and sweet berries, of bitter spice. He bites into the jelled concoction. He chews it. He savors it. Here on earth it will taste different. It will have an earthly flavor that is important to understand before he compares it to the outer s.p.a.ce flavor. Every experiment must have a control.

REX.

... two ... one.

END.

WHAT IS IT.

WHEN G.o.d SPEAKS?.

Diane Williams.

THIS WAS THE house which once inspired a sister of one of the guests to declare, "People kill for this."

That's where the guests were on the perfect afternoon, not the sister.

It was a shame the afternoon became evening before the guests had to leave, not that anything was less lovely because it was evening.

There was a tender quality to the lack of light on the screened-in porch where they all were sitting, as there was also a tender quality to the small girl too old to be in the highchair, but she was not too large for it. The girl had insisted on being put up into the highchair. She was ecstatic to be locked in behind the tray.

Her hands tapped and stroked the tray. She was not up there to eat. It was past time for that.

Behind the handsomest man on the porch was the array of green leafy trees and lawn, lit by a yard light, veiled by the black porch screen. The handsomest man smiled. He was serene.

Across from him, his wife, on the chintz flowered sofa, who was the most beautiful woman, smiled serenely at her husband. She said of her husband to the others, "He never wants to leave here. Look at him! He likes it. The food is so good and healthy. He can keep swimming in your pool. Look at him! He is so happy!"

Then the man lifted up his girl, who was smaller than the other girl, who had never ever-his girl-been irritable even once, there at that house, and he put her up onto his shoulders. Her short legs were pressing on his chest, because he had wanted her legs to do that.

Her father felt his daughter on the back of him and on the front of him, on top of him, all at once. She was slightly over his head too, her head was. Her light heels were tapping lightly on his chest. He took her hands in his. She was ready for the dive that would not be possible unless he would fling her from him.

He should.

KRAFTMARK.

Matthew Derby.

BURTSON WAS WADING calf-deep in a foresty bog, following close behind the guide, a small man in fussy khaki fatigues. The diffuse, lame half-light of dusk punched out the detail of trees in the canopy, making them look like ma.s.sive, buoyant cartoon mascots, maybe a clutch of parade floats for the dead. The color had run out of the world, and they still had not found Alan.

Every time he found a capsized landmine, Burtson was sure it was the last thing he'd see. The mines in this area were different from what he'd come to know through television, word of mouth, knowledge wafers, and childhood memory. The mines he remembered were crisp and angular. They radiated a colorful sphere of dread, and the dread was what kept people from going where they weren't supposed to go. It was a perfect system. These, though, were barely visible at the surface of the swamp. They had an animal quality, like squat snapping turtles, except that, instead of taking an a.s.sworth's flesh from your shoulder, like the real turtles, they would pound you with a bucket of bent nails going a thousand miles per. These were mines like animals that washed on sh.o.r.e after a tsunami-rigid, translucent whipfish that made you sure there was a G.o.d out alone in the universe, hunched over some dense ball of gas, wis.h.i.+ng up the most fantastic creatures just to watch them gorge on their peers and rut like jackhammers.

"THIS LOOKS THE same as the last stretch," he huffed to the guide, light on breath from the struggle to drag his desk and accessories through the dense, sluggish undergrowth that pulled at his delicate loafers with each step.