Scatterbrain
Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 2:53 am
One half of a zombie story; second half pending.
Scatterbrain,
by David Williams
Blood pooled in his hand, clenching, and globs fell on pavement pattering in rain and lightening; hand clenched, flash of light through rain, stones of road, cars slid together at its end, bodies wreathed in metal frames, missing doors and window panes, glass; rain pooled through vehicles.
Long vein of lightning pulsed. Illuminated he walked in wind, blind, and found a street lamp, long lamp, nursed his hand, a latch spreading red, muscle and bone; he wiped the hole against his pants as if drool.
Sea of red from vehicles, squinting at light, running from veins of organs, eyes; a man lay on a dashboard alive.
He fished in his pajama pocket, aimed at the man and fired, a splatter in the passenger seat.
He walked from the entanglement of vehicles, a threshold of an apartment, lights on. He walked up two stairwells, one turning the other and came to a kitchen, his hand in dark space, feeling nothing, nothing untouched. Blood left trail and he put his hand on the freezer, flung open frozen boxes there, some Neapolitan ice cream, mostly gone and with his good hand he puts chunks in his mouth, frozen.
Helicopter ranged in distance and rain found its fingers through roof, dripping spots, his eyes latched on the room’s end, another staircase, and walked down, hand fingering pajama’s pocket.
Three bodies were walking up the road; he stood legs shoulder-width and aimed, firing on one’s back, another’s back and then the middle one’s head, blood invisible in the black.
He walked up to them and decided he would need more ammo, finding in their pockets nothing; wallets very old and useless, money useless; he cursed, threw it aside on the wind’s rain by the gutter. Cars lay on the sidewalk, a man sitting by the frame of his car with his face shorn off, a shotgun propped upon his missing chin and the finger on the trigger.
Rain pounded.
Crossing other side of the street he saw a corner, turned west; no gun shops; one concrete shop, small, with glass missing in large blades, metal wiring behind and lightless; his fingers touched the door-frame missing glass panels, slapping hollow space; merchant’s counter empty, grains or dust strewn like millet; behind that, over, a display case empty and glass punched out.
Checked the revolver, four rounds in, six dangling in pocket.
He found his jammie hat under that, putting it on. The rain was cold and stinging.
Black raced on both sides of the road, over gutters; faces of buildings hardly apparent; three stars shone, his wrist numb from blood from his left hand, he looked at it, the strip longer than he remembered, red from palm to back of hand.
How—he could not remember.
Helicopter spotlight ran over the road, grew large.
He walked through, turned a corner.
Light shone on small grass square, wind wiping wet lines against mason brick; he saw a light inside a church.
He walked to the wood door, stone framing it and pushed open; stale air, benches sagging on Persian rug; altar at back, nearly complete black; three figures laying asleep, breathing distinctly; he walked over the wood, heard it cracking.
‘Who the fuck are you!’
It was an old man. A fourth man dead, behind the altar’s curtain; he pushed the curtain, saw the leg of a fifth man; only the leg; he looked at the three sleeping people, the old man again; he smiled under his cap.
‘Do you know where the gun store is?’
‘I don’t know nothing from nowhere, sonny, now get the fuck out of here. This is the house of the Lord!’
‘So holy you’d eat a man’s leg just to attend?’
The old man seemed to gabber without speaking, just staring with angry empty eyes.
‘You think God condones your existence?’
‘I don’t know nothin’ from nowhere sonny!’
‘Fuck you do.’
He shot him in the forehead; the other two were dead.
He left the Church and into night. Three hours’ silence, walking streets, moon running up. He walked to a Palisade Burger-Mart and fished in the kitchen, finding canisters of old meat, dry and salty and stuck to his lips; spat; there was a heating stand to keep the burgers warm but no electricity.
Eight days he’d gone without food, a solid man but the sound of his own stomach was stronger than anything he’d known.
Water was easy to find; had crouched by storm drains, let current run in mouth. Water from rain on a tarp he found once, tarp sagging like a pregnant belly, he tugging at it, running like a flow too big for lips.
Three years ago he worked as a jeweler.
Shaft of light pierced over the road, another helicopter, blades silent.
He saw the wind retract a moment, the city sitting; dreaded, blasted churned; everything so still it seemed to move at once; he sat, paused on sidewalk; there was a long line of bodies outside a theater; creature-feature on lightless board displayed; walked past the ticket counter, found crumbs between aisles, under seats; there were spare handfuls, nothing more but the groaning ended; there were rooms in theaters he had never explored and explored them; the projector room, quite large, the window overlooking the theaters; looked down on the seats he had scavenged, the high screen of theater, torn in its middle for no reason; why, he could not guess.
Blood welled from hand again, shallow deep smudge, no longer trails crested between finger like piss; he wiped some on the projector, tried but left no mark.
He checked every theater room and left with a bag of old popcorn, so stale it flaked in mouth and the kernels were vaguely sweet.
Eyes watched countless streets, climbed up and down, met ones he’d known too well, others not so; went over fence, fire exits, scaffolding, doors, some locked; dead-bolted; he finally made it away from the network and found a freeway, looking toward a green hill over a high cement wall, houses staring over his head; found the wall short near the end, climbed the hill and went through trim yards by the bushel, opening a couple doors but some impregnable; for those he broke windows, most of the time; only one had a dog barking.
He waited for the dog to come out, a medium thing, and kicked and kicked it until it ran down the road; inside the bedroom the owner’s face had been eaten, cheeks missing in deep gouges, as if the pet had made a meal of its master.
Pushed away from that scene to kitchen, where food was rotten and it took time to find the pantry; he located it, cereals, peanut butter, bad breads, pastries rotten; he sat down with what he could at the kitchen table, wood with the tablecloth clean and opened the peanut butter jar, smelled the thick waft like an open oven, found his fingers scooping it out without spoon; the rest went down too, barely a memory; next house he opened every room and the fridge was full of half-edible things, he was amassing a fortune; milk was terrible, all the time; every house, every time, you found milk that ran in gobs, endless gobs, from yellow jugs. He’d turn it upside down just out of fascination; watch it sit on lightless tiles or wood panel.
The food the refrigerators still kept good he put in the popcorn sac, twisted it at the top and carried that by his waist, leaving the homes and skirting again to the city. His fingers poured over the contents, trying not to eat but indeed did; felt very sick and laid down, then watched his gun glinting in the morning sun the next day, the streets empty, rain drying and carbon monoxide on the asphalt strips, no cars running; everything tunneled against the wind; windows dull, as if heating still running or plainly clear.
One day he had found a radio and twisted the knobs, fairly new one and not a single frequency spoke. He knew cars never worked. There was surely a weapons store about somewhere. If he could find something like that, or perhaps some gasoline. What he would do with the gasoline he could not surmise.
There were two hours of walking streets, again a chopper, this time so high it was a glint in sun, silent.
Creeping along the road was a man in a red towel, covering only his waist, looking very hateful. He seemed on some kind of substance. There were eight cars lined in perfect sequence, how he did not know. There were windows above that with voices, as if a television of perhaps speaking; he could not guess.
Three minutes passed of this sight before he aimed at the man, who turned at him and he fired, feeling very sad for some reason. He watched the man on the ground of the sidewalk, his towel open, genitals exposed and the sun form the heat of the cars winking over that; bodies passed the windows over them; he entered the building, then felt a strange adrenaline in the roof of his mouth and nose; decided not to enter; not right; can’t. He walked up anyway, saw that they were moving but not speaking, looking around the area of a den and then sometimes moving to windows, looking longingly at sky. He stepped backward, down the stairs, walked outside and looked back up at them through windows, they not seeing him.
Two times he aimed at the windows, a woman looking up at the sky and he decided not to fire. She did not notice. He walked back up one last time, hurriedly opening cabinets in the kitchen, anything; they walked by him; one man put a hand on his shoulder, he pushed the man back into another and they both looked toward a window, away from him.
Night came not too long from then and he ate the food from that building, watched it silently and wondered what had happened to them.
He examined himself in a mirror the next day, the curve of his back pressed to his hips, which were nodes of bone.
Mother fucker, he thought.
He stood outside the apartment, walked inside and upstairs. He took one of the men by the arms, rather plump, and directed him down the stairs, slowly; it took thirty minutes to place his feet right; the man was expressionless canvas, tugging him along down an alley like a figurine and sat him amidst a wreckage of newspapers.
‘Can you hear me?’ he said, sitting Indian style with the man.
‘What happened?’ he asked, very high and clear.
‘What happened to you?
‘Why are they just walking around?
‘What’s wrong with you?
‘Hello?’
He looked at the man for the first time, a strange, ugly man who seemed to have become uglier as if from mental illness, and his forehead was scrabbled in scars of mangy black, the rest bald and clean. He shot him in the forehead and in the black night stripped his skin off the column of his body, bathed it in waxen grease and threw it upon a hot pan he had found, so much meat, and he vomited as he worked, twice, before finally having it set as best he could, cooked through, and ate it.
In the morning he woke and the meat was gone and the man was covered in newspaper, face down by two piles of vomit under newspaper, soaking; he stood slowly, wiped his hands over his body and felt no better, his hands holding his cheeks to gauge; little meat on the face. Fuck, he thought.
Fuck. He walked past the house, the people still there in their patterns by the windows, the line-up of cars blockading the road, sitting there in a line as if that were the border of the city but he knew better. His heart lurched, looked at the woman staring out the window pane.
There was no sound; he walked up the building again. Three men and women now, walking around, and the TV was dead; not their voices. He stepped down the stairs, sat at its bottom step and wept bitterly.
Please forgive me God forgive. Please, I had to do it. I’m alive. I’m alive; they’re not. This stays. This stays forever, can’t get rid of it; won’t go. I wanted to be good; I’m still good. I will do good things after this is done. Please don’t let the world die. Please le—
Scatterbrain,
by David Williams
Blood pooled in his hand, clenching, and globs fell on pavement pattering in rain and lightening; hand clenched, flash of light through rain, stones of road, cars slid together at its end, bodies wreathed in metal frames, missing doors and window panes, glass; rain pooled through vehicles.
Long vein of lightning pulsed. Illuminated he walked in wind, blind, and found a street lamp, long lamp, nursed his hand, a latch spreading red, muscle and bone; he wiped the hole against his pants as if drool.
Sea of red from vehicles, squinting at light, running from veins of organs, eyes; a man lay on a dashboard alive.
He fished in his pajama pocket, aimed at the man and fired, a splatter in the passenger seat.
He walked from the entanglement of vehicles, a threshold of an apartment, lights on. He walked up two stairwells, one turning the other and came to a kitchen, his hand in dark space, feeling nothing, nothing untouched. Blood left trail and he put his hand on the freezer, flung open frozen boxes there, some Neapolitan ice cream, mostly gone and with his good hand he puts chunks in his mouth, frozen.
Helicopter ranged in distance and rain found its fingers through roof, dripping spots, his eyes latched on the room’s end, another staircase, and walked down, hand fingering pajama’s pocket.
Three bodies were walking up the road; he stood legs shoulder-width and aimed, firing on one’s back, another’s back and then the middle one’s head, blood invisible in the black.
He walked up to them and decided he would need more ammo, finding in their pockets nothing; wallets very old and useless, money useless; he cursed, threw it aside on the wind’s rain by the gutter. Cars lay on the sidewalk, a man sitting by the frame of his car with his face shorn off, a shotgun propped upon his missing chin and the finger on the trigger.
Rain pounded.
Crossing other side of the street he saw a corner, turned west; no gun shops; one concrete shop, small, with glass missing in large blades, metal wiring behind and lightless; his fingers touched the door-frame missing glass panels, slapping hollow space; merchant’s counter empty, grains or dust strewn like millet; behind that, over, a display case empty and glass punched out.
Checked the revolver, four rounds in, six dangling in pocket.
He found his jammie hat under that, putting it on. The rain was cold and stinging.
Black raced on both sides of the road, over gutters; faces of buildings hardly apparent; three stars shone, his wrist numb from blood from his left hand, he looked at it, the strip longer than he remembered, red from palm to back of hand.
How—he could not remember.
Helicopter spotlight ran over the road, grew large.
He walked through, turned a corner.
Light shone on small grass square, wind wiping wet lines against mason brick; he saw a light inside a church.
He walked to the wood door, stone framing it and pushed open; stale air, benches sagging on Persian rug; altar at back, nearly complete black; three figures laying asleep, breathing distinctly; he walked over the wood, heard it cracking.
‘Who the fuck are you!’
It was an old man. A fourth man dead, behind the altar’s curtain; he pushed the curtain, saw the leg of a fifth man; only the leg; he looked at the three sleeping people, the old man again; he smiled under his cap.
‘Do you know where the gun store is?’
‘I don’t know nothing from nowhere, sonny, now get the fuck out of here. This is the house of the Lord!’
‘So holy you’d eat a man’s leg just to attend?’
The old man seemed to gabber without speaking, just staring with angry empty eyes.
‘You think God condones your existence?’
‘I don’t know nothin’ from nowhere sonny!’
‘Fuck you do.’
He shot him in the forehead; the other two were dead.
He left the Church and into night. Three hours’ silence, walking streets, moon running up. He walked to a Palisade Burger-Mart and fished in the kitchen, finding canisters of old meat, dry and salty and stuck to his lips; spat; there was a heating stand to keep the burgers warm but no electricity.
Eight days he’d gone without food, a solid man but the sound of his own stomach was stronger than anything he’d known.
Water was easy to find; had crouched by storm drains, let current run in mouth. Water from rain on a tarp he found once, tarp sagging like a pregnant belly, he tugging at it, running like a flow too big for lips.
Three years ago he worked as a jeweler.
Shaft of light pierced over the road, another helicopter, blades silent.
He saw the wind retract a moment, the city sitting; dreaded, blasted churned; everything so still it seemed to move at once; he sat, paused on sidewalk; there was a long line of bodies outside a theater; creature-feature on lightless board displayed; walked past the ticket counter, found crumbs between aisles, under seats; there were spare handfuls, nothing more but the groaning ended; there were rooms in theaters he had never explored and explored them; the projector room, quite large, the window overlooking the theaters; looked down on the seats he had scavenged, the high screen of theater, torn in its middle for no reason; why, he could not guess.
Blood welled from hand again, shallow deep smudge, no longer trails crested between finger like piss; he wiped some on the projector, tried but left no mark.
He checked every theater room and left with a bag of old popcorn, so stale it flaked in mouth and the kernels were vaguely sweet.
Eyes watched countless streets, climbed up and down, met ones he’d known too well, others not so; went over fence, fire exits, scaffolding, doors, some locked; dead-bolted; he finally made it away from the network and found a freeway, looking toward a green hill over a high cement wall, houses staring over his head; found the wall short near the end, climbed the hill and went through trim yards by the bushel, opening a couple doors but some impregnable; for those he broke windows, most of the time; only one had a dog barking.
He waited for the dog to come out, a medium thing, and kicked and kicked it until it ran down the road; inside the bedroom the owner’s face had been eaten, cheeks missing in deep gouges, as if the pet had made a meal of its master.
Pushed away from that scene to kitchen, where food was rotten and it took time to find the pantry; he located it, cereals, peanut butter, bad breads, pastries rotten; he sat down with what he could at the kitchen table, wood with the tablecloth clean and opened the peanut butter jar, smelled the thick waft like an open oven, found his fingers scooping it out without spoon; the rest went down too, barely a memory; next house he opened every room and the fridge was full of half-edible things, he was amassing a fortune; milk was terrible, all the time; every house, every time, you found milk that ran in gobs, endless gobs, from yellow jugs. He’d turn it upside down just out of fascination; watch it sit on lightless tiles or wood panel.
The food the refrigerators still kept good he put in the popcorn sac, twisted it at the top and carried that by his waist, leaving the homes and skirting again to the city. His fingers poured over the contents, trying not to eat but indeed did; felt very sick and laid down, then watched his gun glinting in the morning sun the next day, the streets empty, rain drying and carbon monoxide on the asphalt strips, no cars running; everything tunneled against the wind; windows dull, as if heating still running or plainly clear.
One day he had found a radio and twisted the knobs, fairly new one and not a single frequency spoke. He knew cars never worked. There was surely a weapons store about somewhere. If he could find something like that, or perhaps some gasoline. What he would do with the gasoline he could not surmise.
There were two hours of walking streets, again a chopper, this time so high it was a glint in sun, silent.
Creeping along the road was a man in a red towel, covering only his waist, looking very hateful. He seemed on some kind of substance. There were eight cars lined in perfect sequence, how he did not know. There were windows above that with voices, as if a television of perhaps speaking; he could not guess.
Three minutes passed of this sight before he aimed at the man, who turned at him and he fired, feeling very sad for some reason. He watched the man on the ground of the sidewalk, his towel open, genitals exposed and the sun form the heat of the cars winking over that; bodies passed the windows over them; he entered the building, then felt a strange adrenaline in the roof of his mouth and nose; decided not to enter; not right; can’t. He walked up anyway, saw that they were moving but not speaking, looking around the area of a den and then sometimes moving to windows, looking longingly at sky. He stepped backward, down the stairs, walked outside and looked back up at them through windows, they not seeing him.
Two times he aimed at the windows, a woman looking up at the sky and he decided not to fire. She did not notice. He walked back up one last time, hurriedly opening cabinets in the kitchen, anything; they walked by him; one man put a hand on his shoulder, he pushed the man back into another and they both looked toward a window, away from him.
Night came not too long from then and he ate the food from that building, watched it silently and wondered what had happened to them.
He examined himself in a mirror the next day, the curve of his back pressed to his hips, which were nodes of bone.
Mother fucker, he thought.
He stood outside the apartment, walked inside and upstairs. He took one of the men by the arms, rather plump, and directed him down the stairs, slowly; it took thirty minutes to place his feet right; the man was expressionless canvas, tugging him along down an alley like a figurine and sat him amidst a wreckage of newspapers.
‘Can you hear me?’ he said, sitting Indian style with the man.
‘What happened?’ he asked, very high and clear.
‘What happened to you?
‘Why are they just walking around?
‘What’s wrong with you?
‘Hello?’
He looked at the man for the first time, a strange, ugly man who seemed to have become uglier as if from mental illness, and his forehead was scrabbled in scars of mangy black, the rest bald and clean. He shot him in the forehead and in the black night stripped his skin off the column of his body, bathed it in waxen grease and threw it upon a hot pan he had found, so much meat, and he vomited as he worked, twice, before finally having it set as best he could, cooked through, and ate it.
In the morning he woke and the meat was gone and the man was covered in newspaper, face down by two piles of vomit under newspaper, soaking; he stood slowly, wiped his hands over his body and felt no better, his hands holding his cheeks to gauge; little meat on the face. Fuck, he thought.
Fuck. He walked past the house, the people still there in their patterns by the windows, the line-up of cars blockading the road, sitting there in a line as if that were the border of the city but he knew better. His heart lurched, looked at the woman staring out the window pane.
There was no sound; he walked up the building again. Three men and women now, walking around, and the TV was dead; not their voices. He stepped down the stairs, sat at its bottom step and wept bitterly.
Please forgive me God forgive. Please, I had to do it. I’m alive. I’m alive; they’re not. This stays. This stays forever, can’t get rid of it; won’t go. I wanted to be good; I’m still good. I will do good things after this is done. Please don’t let the world die. Please le—
