Apocalypticon (3 page)

“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 shade 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.

Ben was waiting outside his door when he stepped into the hall. “Well don’t you just look like something out of a Stephen King novel!” With the pack of food on his back, a duffel of personal belongings slung across his shoulders, the knife sticking out of his pocket, the wrench in his belt loop, a bat in one hand, and a machete in the other, Ben looked like G. I. Joe-pocalypse. Adding to the overall effect was the fact that he had just freshly shaved his head, and a nick above his left eyebrow trickled a thin line of blood slowly down his brow.

“I’m ready to go all
Desperation
on this city. What do we do with this?” he asked, hefting the machete.

“Ah! Yes.” Patrick slipped his backpack off and pulled at a piece of rope that crossed his chest. It was tied to something long, flat, and brown behind his back at either end. He lifted the whole contraption over his head and held it out for Ben to see. “Holster!” he declared.

Ben eyed the thing suspiciously. “Is that cardboard?”

“
Corrugated
cardboard,” Patrick corrected, “yes. Fastened with flush hinges along this end and metal clasps on this end, see?” he asked, indicating the two long edges of the holster. “If the blade gets stuck, you just pop up the clasps, the top piece falls open, and the machete comes free.
Voila!
” With a flick of his wrists, he unsnapped the sheath. The top flat piece of cardboard flopped over and hung from the bottom piece, swinging lazily.

“If the blade gets stuck inside, couldn’t you just cut your way out?” Ben asked. Sharp metal beats cardboard.”

“First of all, Ben, this is
corrugated
cardboard, please get it straight, and, second, no, you cannot just cut your way out because that would dull the blade, and, besides, a hinged machete holster is a lot of fun to play with, so that’s how I made it. And, now, guess what. Because you questioned it, you don’t get to hold it.” He snatched the machete from Ben’s hand and fit it carefully into the cardboard envelope. He closed it, locked the clasps, and swung the piece back over his shoulder.

“You’re gonna kill someone with that thing,” Ben pointed out.

“Let’s hope it’s neither one of us.” Patrick shouldered his backpack and twirled the baton in his hand. “Well. We should get going.” The baton spun out of control and clattered to the ground. “I am
excellent
at this.”

Ben nodded. “All right, look, before we head out, I have to ask. Are you
sure
you want to do this? We can keep scrounging. We’ve become excellent scroungers. Just because we’re almost out of food now doesn’t mean we have to be almost out of food forever.”

Patrick shook his head. “We’d just be delaying the inevitable. We’re going to hit empty eventually, unless you’re planning on starting a farm, and I refuse to believe you’d look decent in a mesh hat. Besides, don’t think of this as certain suicide! Think of it as an exciting adventure that’s only also certain suicide.”

“That’s a great thought, thanks.”

“Hey, who knows what the world is like over the horizon? I haven’t been farther than North and Halsted since the Monkeys hit. And, Jesus, I haven’t been south at all, not a single block. Besides, even if we stay holed up here, it’s only a matter of time before the scavengers rip through the building. I’d rather take my chances out there, in the unknown, than to die a miserable death at the hands of Cubs fans. Do you understand me, Ben?
I will not die in Cubs territory.
”

Ben tapped the bat nervously on the ground. “You know, you just said some variation of the word ‘death’ about thirteen times. I want to lay all my cards on the table here before we leave. Frankly, Pat, I don’t want to die. I’m starting to think that this trip is some sort of subconscious death wish for you, and that worries me because I’m also going on this trip, but
without
a subconscious death wish. So it feels like a conflict of interest.”

Patrick sighed. No, this wasn’t a death wish trip, but it wasn’t exactly
not
a death wish trip either. “Ben, if you don’t want to go, you should absolutely stay.”

“Ooooh, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve never turned down an ill-advised, dangerous adventure in my life, and I’m not about to start now. Besides, you’re my best friend and also pretty much the only person I know who’s still alive. If you went alone, I’d be bored out of my mind. I’m not backing out, but I’m just saying, if you’re going to be making all of the decisions, you need to make them for both of us. You need to make decisions that keep us alive, no matter how fucked up your heart cavity is from losing your family. I’m your family now, so we keep each other alive,” he finished too gruffly, awkwardly covering his rush of emotion with a thin, pocked veneer of testosterone.

Patrick shoved the baton in his pocket and put both of his hands square on Ben’s shoulders. “Benjamin Alice Fogelvee. Listen to me.” He stared directly into the shorter man’s eyes. “I do not have a death wish, subconscious or otherwise. I’m going to die sometime, whether it’s forty years from now from old age or from falling down the stairwell in two minutes on our way down to the street. But I promise you, I will do my dead level best to arrive safely in Orlando. I have no plans beyond Disney World, but that’s only because I have no idea what the world is like anymore. I can’t plan for it, other than to see it through. Stop worrying about me drowning myself in the lake, and start worrying about the best way to brain someone with the bat, ‘cause it’s a long road to Union Station. Okay?”

Ben patted Patrick’s hand. “You had me at ‘brain someone with the bat.’”