They sat under the flickering light and smoked.
"We have to leave," Chris said. He'd been saying that since they got here.
Joey nodded. He'd been nodding for a while. He agreed. That didn't mean it
was going to happen. In the distance, he heard the whipcrack and rolling echo
of JC's gun.
"He's getting better at that," he said. JC had been practising for a week,
ever since he found the .45 under the counter.
"Maybe he'll do some good one day," Chris said, leaning forward and tapping a
long column of ash onto the concrete.
"Justin did say he saw a rabbit. Maybe he--"
"Justin is full of shit."
"And. Yeah. He wasn't really all there, either, I guess."
The cigarettes were gone, smoked greedily down to the filter, and they were
rationing, so no chain-smoking, even though it was tempting. There was
tobacco and beer and bags of ageing corn chips in the back room, but they
didn't know how long they'd have to stay here. Hell, maybe the rest of the
world really was gone. Thank god for the gas tanks, because the generator
worked. They had power enough to run the freezer.
The door opened, and there was Christina, shivering in her thin blouse. Her
hair was a tangled, dusty mess. She hadn't taken well to the conditions here.
"Duty hollers," Chris said with a crooked grin that wasn't entirely honest.
Joey smacked him over the head and went to see what Christina wanted. Maybe
the water canister was leaking, or there was a rat in the pantry again. Maybe
Justin had finally come down from wherever he'd been flying.
Justin and Lance were lost on Thursday - or at least what they thought was
Thursday - and found again on last night, when the sun dipped below the spiky
mountaintops, and the wind cooled down. They wandered off somehow, and didn't
return. JC found them on one of his dirt bike expeditions, huddled in a crag
like two lost sheep. They had drunk the water in a stagnant pool, and had no
idea where they were or who they were or what had happened.
Later that night, when everyone was safely back at the way station and
gathered in the murky, attic-smelly living room, Justin started crying
violently, without warning. Lance smiled a bright sunshine grin and kissed
his cheekbones, licked away the tears, hugged him and rocked him gently. The
rest of them stared quietly, or looked away in embarrassment. Joey looked at
JC, and saw his mouth curl up at the corners, just a little.
"But it-- it-- it hurts!" Justin hiccuped, shivered and squirmed, and finally
just tore off his shirt. "It burns," and his face was scrunched up like an
infant's.
"What did they do?" Chris said.
Christina was sitting next to Joey, pressed against his side, twig-thin and
shivering. "Don't drink the water," she said shrilly, "don't drink the water,
don't drink the water, don't--"
"Shhh," Joey said.
"Jesus, shut up," Chris said. He didn't like Christina. Joey had no idea why.
Justin had managed to shimmy out of his jeans, too, and lay naked on the
floor like a model in an old painting, bronze and gold and pale cream. No one
left, or did anything. Lance was petting him gently, giggling to himself,
stroking Justin's chest and stomach, still licking his face. Justin cried
plaintively and lay still on the uneven floorboards like it hurt to move.
"Whatever he's on, remind me not to do it," Chris said after a while. He was
looking on with interest now, scratching his beard absently.
"Yeah, man, we'll keep you from drinking outta holes in the ground," JC said.
He was smiling a little wider now.
"He looks good doing it, though," Chris said, nodding. Justin was moving
slowly now, stretching one limb after another in some sort of odd, horizontal
dance.
Lance laughed out loud and whispered loudly, "I love you, I love you, I love
you, I love you," but it wasn't clear who he meant. He sat cross-legged next
to Justin, and his face shone bright with ecstatic joy. "I love you," he said
again, to Justin this time, with a slow stroke down Justin's long, muscular
back, all the way down, "because you glitter." That seemed to remind him of
something, because he scrambled up and staggered around the room for a while,
bumping into furniture and people on his meandering way. He stumbled and fell
on Joey, and he was hot and dry and thrumming with excitement. "Sorry,
sorry," he mumbled and pushed himself up, his hands scrabbling all over
Joey's chest and lap.
"What are you looking for?" JC said when Lance muttered in frustration and
turned over a basket of small screwdrivers and key chains onto a cluttered
table.
"He glitters," Lance said, apparently in way of explanation. "oh! oh!" and he
held up a tube of ... glitter, right. Body glitter. How he knew there was
glitter somewhere in this room in the first place would probably remain a
mystery.
Chris brought beer, and they watched, half-entranced, as Lance smeared Justin
with the glitter, made him sparkle in the hesitant light, painted swirls and
flowers and psychedelic shapes in shimmering gold over his skin. Justin
stopped crying and lay motionless, blinking owlishly and humming something
tunelessly under his breath.
Christina fell asleep with her head in Joey's lap. He stroked her dirty hair
and watched Lance, watched Justin, drank his beer.
When he turned to say something to Chris, he saw that Chris was staring at
him with expressionless eyes.
He went back outside after he'd saved Christina from a dead bird and the
smear it had left on the back window. She cried when he carried it away. She
was difficult to figure out. She had climbed onto the roof to check the
chimney when they tried to get the fireplace to work, but she couldn't go
into the pantry alone.
Chris was still sitting in the folding chair outside the door.
"What was the situation?" he asked dryly.
"Dead bird," Joey said. His hands looked grubby, like the smears of blood
he'd washed off in the barrel in the kitchen were still there.
"She's such a girl," Chris muttered.
"She is a girl," Joey said.
"Did you check in on the kids?"
"If they heard you calling them that, they'd kick your ass," Joey said, but
he had checked in on them, and he'd even thought of them as 'kids', even
though Lance was only two years younger than him. They'd been asleep in a
pile of naked limbs, and the sunlight filtering in through the tattered
curtains had reflected in shimmering jewel flashes from their glitter-smeared
skin.
"Well, fuck it, the young men, then," Chris scoffed.
"They're fine. Still asleep."
"I guess. I guess there wasn't any permanent damage, then," he said, and Joey
looked up sharply. He hadn't dared think about that.
"Dunno."
He was going to say something else, maybe ask why Chris was so angry at
Christina, maybe just talk about the weather, but then JC's bike swerved to a
halt in a cloud of sand, and he was running towards them, stumbling on the
cracked concrete.
"Hey, hey, hey, keep your pants on," Chris said, getting up and catching him
in flight. JC was flushed and panting, and his eyes were bright, bright blue
in the sun.
"I saw it!" he yelled, "dust, I saw a cloud, someone's coming!"
He didn't have to yell for long, because now Joey could see it, too. A car,
he thought. The bikes didn't make such big clouds.
He couldn't help smiling. They'd been here for a month. More, maybe. Thirty-
five, forty days, and not a sign of life. Not even the silver bullet of an
airplane ten thousand feet up. Nothing.
Then he saw Chris' face, frowning and dark-eyed, and his own smile faltered.
"What?"
"What?" JC said, too.
"Maybe you should go wake up the sleeping beauties," Chris said. "JC, get
your gun."
"What?" Joey said again, dumbly. Chris rolled his eyes.
"It could be anyone. Anyone."
He had to shake Justin for five minutes before he woke up, and even then he
was sluggish and drowsily pliant when he tried to make him put clothes on.
Lance was a little better off, but he complained of a headache and ran to the
outhouse wearing only boxers and residual glitter.
"Justin, come on," Joey said and tried to force his arms down the sleeves of
his tee shirt.
"My head is a big balloon," Justin said softly. He was blinking constantly,
and Joey worried that he'd start crying again.
"Are you okay? Do you need to barf?"
"I'm hungry," he said, but he seemed to perk up a little, and pulled on the
tee shirt in a flash of lucidity. "I think I haven't eaten. When did I eat?"
"Yesterday, just a little," Joey said and handed him his patched, sandy
jeans. "Before you decided to take off all your clothes and roll on the
floor."
"Wow," Justin said. "I think there's an angel under the bed, though. I heard
her move."
Ten minutes later, they were all standing just inside the door, mostly
dressed and coherent. Lance was pale and grim and clutching his stomach,
Justin swayed lightly and seemed to be looking at the shadows in the corners
with frowning concentration, as if there were things there only he could see
or understand.
A car pulled up. It was black under a cover of dust, and it roared angrily at
them. It might have started life as a GTO, but it had been modified in every
way imaginable, and was no longer entirely recognisable as such. It looked
older than God, and Joey wondered, not for the first time, if maybe it wasn't
the world that had disappeared, but they.
The front doors opened with creaks and clangs. Christina leaned on Joey and
stood on tiptoe to see out the dirty window in the door.
"What are they-- who are they?" she asked, and predictably, there's was a
hissed, "sssh!" from Chris.
They were women. Two of them, one short and one tall, both with blond hair in
thick braids down their backs. The tall one, the driver, had a gun stuffed in
the waistband of her cut-offs.
Everyone held their breaths, and they could hear the short woman say, "They
must still be here," and the tall one answer,
"Must be pretty fucking paranoid by now, though."
They walked straight towards the door, and inside, everyone backed off like
sheep from a dog. "What now?" Joey mouthed at Chris.
Chris poked JC in the side and pointed to his gun. Made a pissy face when JC
looked blank. "Take it, moron!" he hissed. "Point it at the door."
"But--"
"Do it!"
When the tall woman kicked in the door, she had her gun in her hand. Joey
figured it might have been a standoff, if JC hadn't looked so scared.
"Watch where you're pointing that thing, sugar," the woman said. Then her
friend showed up in the doorway, and she had a gun, too, and that was that.
They were Dacey and Dale, and all they had was the car and their guns, and
fifty thousand useless dollars in the trunk. "We figured we could use it as
kindling," Dale said around a mouthful of hot alphabet soup.
"--if we need to make a fire," Dacey finished for her.
They also had a mission. "We're trying to collect people."
"Set up communications again."
"This way station would be--"
"--perfect."
They were a little like Donald Duck's nephews, only just two, and Joey didn't
remember thinking Huey, Dewey, and Louie were hot. And most of the time, they
didn't have large handguns, either.
It was weird, how none of them talked about ... anything. As if their lives
had started abruptly when they first stumbled into the station, sweaty,
dirty, covered in sand. Joey had been carrying Christina, but he couldn't
remember picking her up.
They never asked each other questions about before. do you remember? where
did you come from? do we know each other? were unnecessary and
unanswerable, and even thinking about it made something tighten in Joey's
head, a quiet threat of pain, maybe.
Justin and Lance might have known each other from before. They had a strange
relationship: joined at the hip, and still they didn't seem to like each
other very much. Justin talked to Chris, looked up to him, probably, and
Lance sat next to him, sometimes quiet, sometimes smiling and talking to JC.
If he left, Justin got restless.
They also slept together, but Joey figured it was rude to ask if they had
sex. He'd get curious at night, though, when he lay awake with his arm around
Christina's tiny waist and listened to the wind howl outside. How comfortable
it was to have her, to have her to lie next to. To know that he could wake
her up if he wanted to, and she'd be sleepy and warm and wrap her long legs
around him. He hardly ever did, though. He didn't think she liked it as much
as he did. Maybe she was just grateful that he'd carried her in the desert.
Chris and JC were the only ones who slept alone. JC because, well, he slept
at the oddest hours, and sometimes Joey heard him walk around the house,
tramp tramp tramp on creaky floorboards, muttering under his breath. JC was
only half present in the world most of the time.
Joey didn't know anything about Chris, except that he sometimes caught him
staring with his intense, black eyes.
Joey thought Chris would flirt more with Dale and Dacey than he did. He
seemed a little morose, in fact. He showed them the shallow graves behind the
tanks where Joey had helped him bury the corpses they found in the house.
"They were old, I think," Chris said when he pointed them out. Two low mounds
of sand, with a cover of pebbles and rocks. "Um, I think. Cause it was kinda.
Uh."
"They had been there for a while," Joey said. He'd been oddly untouched by
the dry mummies. Chris had blanched and cursed and Joey thought he heard him
cry later. None of the others would even come into the house while the bodies
where there.
"Uhuh," Dale said. Dacey rubbed her shoulder. Dale shrugged it off. "We need
to get an antenna up," she said tersely.
Christina seemed to perk up a little in female company. She washed her hair
in the morning, let it dry in the sun and twisted it into a single, thick
braid. Joey touched it and liked the new softness. She leaned against him,
and pressed her face into his neck. Then she pulled back and straightened.
Her eyes were wide and dark. He liked her eyes.
"Do you even like me?" she asked softly. "Just a little?"
That came out of the blue, and he didn't know what to say. She was sweet.
Pretty. She was useful, sometimes. He had no idea what she thought, if she
thought, what she liked, what she wanted. He wondered, right now, why he
hadn't bothered to find out.
"I like you," he said, seconds too late.
"Yeah," she said, and later, he saw her talking seriously to Dale and Dacey.
They looked like family, all of them, with their blonde braids glowing honey-
warm in the sun. Huey, Dewey and Louie, Joey thought, but it wasn't funny.
JC's hobbies were solitary ones. He talked about hunting until someone
pointed out that there was nothing to hunt. Then he found the dirt bike and
tinkered with it for days. They didn't see him a lot, just heard him singing
out in the back yard, singing songs that he made up himself, because none of
them, not even JC, remembered any real ones. JC's songs were about whatever
he was thinking about at the time, Joey noticed. "a monkey wrench is good to
have, good to have, it'd be the fucking bomb to have," he sang, or maybe,
"when I can ride my bike in the desert, I'll be happy as a happy happy cat."
He had a nice voice.
Justin sometimes went out to talk to him, and sang along with different
words. Joey saw Lance watching them from his staked out place in the shade of
the overhang.
"Don't know when we'll get a connection working," Dale said.
"We think there's another way station about fifty miles south," Dacey said.
"Once we get them all lined up--"
"--it should be easy."
"Maybe once people--"
"--whoever is still around--"
"--start talking again, they'll remember."
"What came before."
"Do we want to?" Chris said, and Joey wondered what made him so bitter. He
should be happy. Christina was leaving, and they'd be stuck out here, five
guys and an antenna, and Joey thought it would be pretty fucking fantastic to
remember his life.
There was food. A whole basement full. Rows after row of cans. The old couple
must have been some kind of survivalist weirdos or something, because there
was enough soup and meatballs and spaghetti sauce here to feed an army for a
year.
They didn't worry much about the future. There was no past, so they weren't
banking on anything. Sometimes Chris would look at Joey as if he wanted to
say "what if", but he never did. One day was much like the rest of them.
They waited, but didn't know for what.
Christina left with Dale and Dacey, in a high cloud of dust, accompanied by
the dull roar of the modified GTO. Later, Joey sat on the bed he'd shared
with her and tried to remember what colour her eyes were.
When he came out of his room, he saw Justin and Lance kissing through the
open door to theirs. Lance had tangled his fingers in Justin's thick curls.
Joey looked away, but he looked back when he passed, just briefly, and saw JC
sitting on the bed, watching them with serious eyes. Joey walked on.
Chris was in his usual chair. He had a beer and a cigarette, and it looked so
normal, so ... right, that Joey felt a tug somewhere in his chest, and he
thought it might have been a memory. Of what, he had no idea.
"Guess we're stuck here, huh?" Chris said when Joey sat down next to him.
"I guess," Joey said. "There's enough food here for, I don't know. Years."
"Sorry about. Her."
Chris was studying the label on his bottle of Bud very intently. Joey said,
"It's okay. She wasn't-- I don't--" Of course he did, though. Miss her now
that she wasn't here anymore. But he thought he might miss Chris more if he
left. For example. Maybe he knew Chris better. Maybe they'd been friends
once. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
"Have a beer, Joey, you've lost the power of speech," Chris muttered and
handed him a bottle. Joey felt another one of those tugs. Maybe they'd get
... clearer. Maybe one day he'd remember.
"I think, I think I might remember--" he blurted helplessly. Remember things.
Nothing clear. Just a feeling that there were things waiting somewhere in his
brain.
"Yeah," Chris said, not sounding surprised at all. "I might remember, too,"
and he put a hand on Joey's knee and leaned in and stared at him, dead in the
eye, for way too long. Joey didn't back off or squirm, though. He could look
back. He thought about Justin and Lance, and JC sitting so quietly on their
bed.
"It's not just any port in a storm," he said when he leaned down to meet
Chris. He felt he needed to clarify. Maybe just to himself.
"Any way station in a sand storm," Chris said, and laughing was rare, but
kissing and laughing at the same time felt almost familiar.
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