I hear voices from across the booking station. Derrick and Randy stand at a table. Six or seven shotguns lie there and I’m like hell yeah and they turn, Randy smiling, Derrick nothing but intimidating tits.
Randy asks how my skills are with a shotgun.
Survived a week out there, man.
Guess that settles that, he says.
I take hold of one of the guns, pump it, examine it like I know what I’m looking for.
Don’t get too excited, Randy says, nonlethal rounds.
Huh?
The ammo. Rubber slugs.
I laugh like he’s joking and Derrick looks like he’s disgusted with me or the guns, I can’t really tell.
So they’re worthless?
’Bout to find out, Derrick says. He pumps one of the guns and starts toward the closed interrogation room. He fumbles with a set of keys and then it’s laughter and I think about finding a cure and that Chuck being my test subject and about me saving the fucking world and I tell him to hold up, need to test my cure.
He laughs.
I stand next to Derrick’s hulking body. I’m scared because the Chuck is handcuffed to a breakable table and because I’m holding on to stolen scante. Derrick’s arm brushes against mine. His are like the thighs of midwestern milkmaids; mine are like little kid dicks.
Derrick says, Bet my experiment works better than yours.
Randy laughs. He says, Let him at least try.
I’m not really listening. I’m staring at this kid handcuffed to the table. He’s missing a piece of flesh along his chin. It’s like he had the tweak bugs so bad he struck bone. His freckles are so familiar. And then I’m feeling faint because it’s coming back to me—the Starbucks restroom, Frank from the halfway house, us relapsing together, he with dope, me with crystal, the needle in his arm and the way he didn’t close his eyes and how their little bit of green diluted into a shitty brown after ten minutes.
A rubber slug inside that mouth has got to do some damage, Derrick says.
I’m thinking about this somehow being my boy Frank. I’m telling myself it’s not him, he’s dead, saw the shit for myself, dead and I left him there with the belt still around his arm.
Mate, looks like you seen a ghost.
More like he’s thinking
why the fuck would I want to cure that?
Derrick says.
I don’t respond. I smell this kid’s decay and I smell the pine-fresh cleaner of Starbucks years before and I’m not sure what to do, then or now, nothing but death and guilt and fear.
Having second thoughts? Derrick says. He waves the loaded rig in my face. He’s laughing like this shit is so funny. The hands tattooed on his neck jiggle. He says, Plans always sound better sitting around shooting scante, don’t they?
He raises the shotgun.
I take a step inside of the room. I reach back and he gives me the needle and Randy’s telling me to be careful and I tell myself this isn’t Frank and I had no other option back in that restroom than to leave him and the pressure behind my eyes is like a gouge on soft basswood. The freckles, that’s the resemblance. I tap out air bubbles. Derrick says something about the Chuck not caring about air bubbles or cotton fever. Maybe the laughter is the same? I can’t remember Frank’s laugh, only that he did it a lot. But I’m hearing this little-kid giggle and it sounds innocent and I’m thinking about her,
Innocence
with her fucking umbrella socks. I inch closer. The Chuck snaps at me with his mouth. I jam the rig into his leg.
I step back.
The needle sticks out of the Chuck’s leg.
I’m seeing the needle in Frank’s arm, his North Face bunched up around his elbow.
Then I realize that it’s not laughing, not even a giggle, dead silent, the Chuck just sitting there. Derrick and Randy step closer. They stare at this kid. They’re probably praying for
him to stay silent, telling whatever god they’ve abandoned that this is it, the one wish, please do this for me, please. They’re probably thinking about production on a massive scale and maybe about an effective way to administer it, maybe some sort of dart gun loaded with Tina. I wish KK was here seeing the miracle. It’d fix everything. The best of both worlds—guilt-free using and safety.
We’ll clear the jail one Chuck at a time. We’ll start in the juvie wards and we’ll select one, the five of us gagging him, handcuffs, demonic laughs, give him the remedy, watch his eyes become spun and feel his pulse kick and we’ll know what he’ll be feeling—a deluge of dopamine, a combination of orgasms and game-winning field goals and being tucked in by your mother, her hair tickling your nose when she bends over to kiss your forehead—and then the former Chuck will say, What the fuck happened? and we’ll laugh, these ones real.
It starts low.
It’s so low I don’t know what it is and then Derrick steps back and they’re louder now, this motherfucker’s bellows. The kid fills the detention room with the sound of death. I picture KK hearing it all the way from her cell. Her first response will be lighting a cigarette and burning her stomach, her mind telling her she’s a dumb cunt to believe in happily ever afters.
Goddamn it, Derrick says.
He whips the shotgun up and fires into the Chuck’s chest. The kid flies backward, dragging the table with him. My ears ring. The Chuck’s T-shirt is ripped and I wait for that thick blood to come dripping out, but it doesn’t. He keeps laughing.
Derrick turns to leave and we bump shoulders and he says it again, this time a yell, Goddamn it.
Both experiments have failed.
Randy tries to be upbeat with his closed-lip smiles. He shakes his head, saying, Thought we had something. Thirty seconds of silence.
I don’t respond.
Randy puts his hand on my shoulder, leading me out of the interrogation room. He shuts the door. There’s a pane of Plexiglas. The Chuck stares. I think he knows me too. I can feel it, the recognition, the need to connect. Randy says something about trying again later. There’s a stab of pain behind my left eye. The pressure will follow. And it’s like this motherfucker is laughing right at me and everything I’ve ever done and it’s like Frank is there, immortal in my guilt.
I’m in the hallway. I’m not really feeling going back to KK yet, know she’ll still be all you-ruined-my-life. I figure I’ll duck off farther down the hall and blast a hit of the pocketed dope. I smile at this. The smile makes the pressure behind my eyes even worse.
I head toward cell block B.
The giggles grow louder.
Why the fuck won’t these things die? There can’t be any people left to eat. Maybe they don’t need sustenance? Maybe they’re more evolved? Some higher species, self-sustaining, not
needing sleep or food or scante or love or daylight or shelter and maybe they’re the perfect life-form to inhabit our stupid fucking planet. It’s dark in the hallway. Their laughter gets louder. I’m not sure if this is because I’m nearer or if they hear me, smell me, sense me. I can’t stop thinking about Frank. Maybe it’s survival of the fittest. Maybe the world had had enough with
Homo sapiens
. Waved its white flag. Said fuck you, your turn is over. You ruined everything. You pissed in my water, polluted my skies, raped my mountains, built monuments to yourselves and the shit was shortsighted. So get the fuck off my tits. And boom. Armageddon. The apocalypse. It’s the shit people have been fearing and having nightmares about since we crawled down from trees. An intuitive fear of extinction. That our turn would soon be over. And the next in line—fucking Chucks.
I’m standing a few feet away from cell block B.
The two white metal doors shake like they’re holding back a flash flood. It’s not just fists pounding, but whole bodies charging. I wonder if they have brains. If they can think. Maybe a little? Maybe that’s the next step in evolution, humans losing our cognitive powers. Reverting to primitive animals. But maybe even lower, because the walking dead aren’t trying to reproduce, as far as I can tell. I think about all the free time a male species would have without trying to get pussy. Without the fairy-tale notion of love, without any emotional connection to anybody. Motherfuckers would rule the world. Motherfuckers
are
ruling the world.
I see a set of fingers under the door. They wiggle. They’re black. I inch closer. They flap and wave like a queen offering
dick sucks for twenty a swallow. My retinas feel like they’re suffering from a thousand simultaneous paper cuts. I smash the heel of my Nikes down on the four wiggling fingers. The sound is a shit plopping into a toilet. I giggle. The hand slips back under the door. The splattered concrete is like one of those Thanksgiving hand turkeys I made as a little kid.
I walk deeper into juvie.
It’s darker.
KK should be over our little fight by the time I get back. She’ll be spun bad, but she’ll see me and she’ll know it’s love. She’ll feel it, just like she always has. She’ll drop the hardened exterior. She’ll let me take her in my arms and tell her she’s a good person.
I stop dead, looking at the doors of cell block A. There’s a dent protruding maybe three inches. Giggles and laughs. I smell decaying flesh. It reminds me of worms left in the sun in a little white bait container. The force the Chucks slam into the wall with is scary. I can’t stand it. I stare at the dent, wondering how long it took to create. Was it one charge? A week’s worth of pounding? Either way, it’s not good. It would take maybe three inches more for the metal to split open. For hands to stick through. For that hole to grow. For those giggles to become more than locked-away echoes.
I lean against the wall and watch the hands wiggle under the door and I think about that little girl who started this shit with the umbrella-and-raindrop socks and I’m picturing her jumping in puddles, splashing and laughing, happy. I’m seeing those puddles as Chuck blood, the source being the stomping of fingers. I laugh at this thought. I spit into a spoon. I use
my lighter to crush a little of the stolen glass. I’m thinking about getting a knife, playing This Little Piggy with as many of their fingers as I can find. I load my syringe. The cackles are a chorus. I replay the idea that I’m still sitting on Type’s couch. That my heart said fuck this and exploded and everything since is the release of death chemicals. The needle slipping into my vein is like the rehearsed sex life of a married couple and I push down and will the pressure in my sinuses to go away and I’m seeing Frank’s body limp and I’m hearing his laughs through a piss slit of Plexiglas.
Hello?
It sounds like the voice is coming from behind the door.
Chase?
The voice comes from the opposite side of the hallway. I turn and see Maddie backlit, lanky and young and insecure.
I yank the needle out of my arm and slip it into my pocket.
What are you doing?
I don’t know, man. Seeing what we’re up against, I say.
Maddie stands ten feet away and stares at the door and then at me. I trace his vision straight to my arm, my bunched-up sleeve, my raised vein.
The hell you get more?
The fuck you talking about, man?
He points to my arm and I shake my head, shrug. I look at my arm like I’m just now realizing my sleeve’s up. I make a big show of pretending to understand his confusion. I’m like, Oh, guess that’s what it looks like, huh? Just checking to see how my vein’s doing.
Oh.
I can tell he’s not sold on my explanation. He won’t come any closer. I put him on the defensive by asking what he’s creeping around back here for.
He says, Checking on the dent.
I know, right? Was just looking at the cameras with Type. That hole’s not looking good either.
Maddie’s hand goes straight to his face, his forehead, his fingers finding a partially healed scab, picking. He’s obviously quit thinking about me shooting a secret stash. But I’m not a dick, not trying to freak the kid out any more than need be, so I tell him it’s fine, it’ll hold.
Finally, he says, Like how big’s the hole?
Watermelon.
Fuck. They aren’t getting through, are they?
No. And there’s the stairs and then the door, so I mean, we’re all good.…
I’m not sure if I’m assuring him or myself. We watch the door to cell block A shake and we stand there for a while, not saying anything, waiting for it all to fall apart. Maddie’s a mess, a scared, scab-covered fuckup. He picks zits and sores and he’ll carry these scars his entire life and this amount of time probably won’t be very long. This makes me sad because he’s so clearly me. Maybe not exactly. Maybe different circumstance. Maybe his family lives on the south side and his descent into meth was more natural, wasn’t a form of rebellion, but it doesn’t matter. He’s me. He’s in juvie. He shoots scante because he can’t handle a fucking thing. He shoots it because he thinks it’s better than the alternative.
Let’s get out of here, I say. I stand and put my arm around
his shoulder and I’m trying to be a big brother because I’m the motherfucking glue keeping the human species alive, but I feel like a fag so I bring my arm back to my side.
Think it will hold?
I say, Yeah, man, and like Randy said, they’re bound to die sooner or later, you know? Can’t survive on nothing. Probably start eating each other.
Yeah.
My mouth matches my pounding heart. I say, Might be onto something with the cure. About thirty seconds of silence after the shot.
Oh.
Then I’m on a roll, spun from the booster, telling him that we’ll cook batches and batches, that we’re planning on making tranq guns to shoot the remedy, from there it’ll be bombs of scante, hand grenades of vaccination. We’ll make the world safe and docile and we’ll conquer this shit and it’s going to start with my boy Frank in the detention room.
Frank?
What?
Who’s Frank? Maddie asks.
Frank?
Fuck man, don’t know any
Frank
. I said
Chuck
.
I put my arm back around his shoulder and pull him in a mock embrace. He comes to me easily, so light. We walk toward our home in cell block C. I reach into my pocket and feel the little shard of stolen scante. I place it in his hand, tell him it was my morning dose, had a tiny bit left over from before. He grins. I’m not sure if this is me being nice or some sort of bribe. I glance at the Chuck blood pictograph from the
stomped fingers as we pass block B. I’m smiling. I say, Gonna beat this thing, my boy, gonna beat it.