Rascal, TX

Here they munch on your scalp, teething back flesh like the skin off a chicken breast, salty and moist. Here they don’t much care what you got under the hood, so long as it’s soft and pink and goes well with the blood stew that’s cradled by your cracked cranium. Here we got a system in place for if you get bit: Dale brings you out behind the barn and paints the broadside a dark red with his twelve-gauge. If Dale ever got bit—Jeremiah said once—Jeremiah himself would take over that responsibility going forward. Three months past Dale took Jeremiah behind the barn and made him face the wall because he couldn’t look at his son while he did it. Dale cried and cried for a long time after that, and since then Axel has been in charge of the gallows work. Axel took the buck-kicker and the Benson twins behind the barn a few days back when Barb found Bill crawling out from the abandoned K-Shack on what used to be Duncan Ave with a ribbed semi-circle hunk sanctioned out of his calf and Barb ran back into the K-Shack to get herself bit because she didn’t want to live in a world without Bill. Axel handled it well for a twenty-something, his first two executions. Many more to come.

Here the rules of society went the way of disco, but a few good Samaritans troubled themselves to form a council to handle the issues our impressive supply of 9mm rounds couldn’t. Folks who feel entitled to recompense can bring it to the council where they take a vote, but most folks on the council aren’t really in it for the justice, but for the additional rations—the official ones straight from the military outfit we thunderfucked two weeks after outbreak. The berets came into Rascal, TX expecting to exterminate mice, they did. Here in Rascal the code is “Don’t start none, won’t be none.” That day we added a Second Commandment to our tablet: “You bring a fight, we bring hell.” Abby told me once, way after, that they didn’t come down our way to clear us out, but to drop off supplies and MRE’s. She ran with a force upstate that went town to town doing the same before she ended up here. I told her she didn’t see the tanks and guns that day, told her not to worry the others with such ideas and to kick open a lawn chair and pour herself some ‘shine. I didn’t see any tanks or guns that day either. Here in Rascal, TX we survive.

I look up at the black pitch of the sky most of the time. Here the infected can’t really get in since Tallow and Diana put up all that electric fencing, so the only risk is in going out, so I don’t. Folks stopped talking about the eternal night too long ago to remember, like they all just up and forgot about the sun. Once, we had peace in this world. On the TV they said everything would be fine we just kept ourselves low and safe. Only idiots got themselves infected and the general sentiment among the remaining possessors of common sense was that you were dumb enough to go outside you deserved to catch it. You deserved a big old mouthful of meat bit right out of your dumb ass. After the Black Sky we sort of forgot ourselves, became venomous creatures battling in a bottomless pit. With no future to climb for, we could only reach back to the past; a past of violence and tribal supremacy. Rascal, TX is no mere tribe—it’s a battalion, an armory. That’s why I stay, the security affords me some peace of mind as I look into the void and wonder.

Here we kept growing marijuana even after the Fall of Mankind. Small batch moonshine flows like a river. Pablo smuggles in Mexican tobacco for us, and we roll it up in old Bible pages. Don’t worry, madre Maria blesses each page with a prayer and a spit of holy water before it goes up in flames. If God is really up there, we are looking at his dilated pupil. I ask sometimes what He wants and why He let all this happen and I get nothing in response. Not even after I smoke down a pinch of grass rolled up in Deuteronomy 28:28. Amy Ritter once joked that it was God’s asshole we were looking down. If you wondered whether He’s got any sense of humor—Amy got bit on the ass while down in Pueblo picking up some coffee in exchange for 9mm, and Ronnie Jenkins rifled her down as she came shambling up to the south gate with her pants down around her ankles.

Here (and I assume everywhere that’s got survivors) everyone is pale and our eyes don’t work too well anymore. Optic Degeneration by Elongated Exposure, some scientist figured—seemed to be happening all over. I can see just fine, but all I see is black and it’s getting closer. The ‘shine tastes like sweetened water and doesn’t give my head the buzzes anymore. Cigarettes smell like blasphemy and give me waking nightmares. Weed just makes me forget, which feels wrong since I’m the only one who seems to remember what life used to be. If I was still young, I’d have fought for it, for the Old Ways. My knees creak when I get out of my chair to piss and my hands can’t hardly grip a .22 anymore, much less and buck-kicker. Before, kids used to run around in the street and scrape their elbows. Now, a kid gets a splinter and he’s in the infirmary getting a full toxicology report before you can say, “It’s just a scratch, you nimrod.” The blackness reaches into my mind like tentacles sometimes, like from all directions, reaching down into my throat through my brain. It’s got a kind of forever-downward-spiraling tune attached to it that I can feel reverberating in my teeth and rattling down my nervous system. The Longing brings some sad thoughts with it, like memories of when I used to be a kid and I played under the sun; sad because it’s over, I guess, sad because I can’t ever go back. But also sad sad like when pop died. I remember it like I’m there, actually there, like my body got teleported to the past and I watch his casket get lowered into the ground and it feels like he’s not really in there ‘cuz I can’t see him and it doesn’t even feel like he’s gone and mama’s crying and I have to console her but I never really get the chance to feel it and now it’s sort of carried with me everywhere I go weighing down my chest like an anchor and when I think about it I want to cry but I know if I cry I might never stop so I don’t and my cheeks get flush and my lungs fill with hot oil, then I’m sucked out of the memory and there I am back in my lawn chair with a cigarette smoldered out between my fingers looking up into the Encroaching Black that no one else seems to notice. Here we don’t talk about things so much as we assume everybody else just feels it too.

There aren’t many stars left, I noticed. I asked Jaime about where the stars might have gone and she said, “I never seen John Denver in concert,” like I had asked about whether she had seen John Denver in concert or something. When I look at the others, like Dale or Axel or Ronnie or Jaime they just look back at me sort of vaguely afraid or uncertain. Their eyes look like children’s eyes, wide and empty. Dale just lays there next to me, his limbs sort of sprawled all about and his tongue loose over his bottom lip. He hasn’t talked in a while, and I wish he would speak up because it’s been lonely these past months. I forgot what the sun looked like; it’s just a hot, bitter memory now. I can feel its radiance on my skin sometimes when I let the tentacles take me back, but I can never see the thing that used to be in the sky. Here there are no stars in the sky, and really, there’s no sky at all.

A stranger approached me and Dale this morning (at least it felt like morning). He carried Dale inside because Dale had been sleeping for a while so the stranger put him to bed. The stranger asked me what I was drinking, and I said, “Cherry ‘shine, friend,” but there was nothing in my glass ‘cept dust. He looked up at the nothingness where the sky once was and asked me what I saw in it. I told him I saw God in it, and the Devil, and everything in between. I told him I saw life and death all at once, I saw time folding in on itself, everything around it getting real slow, like the plants don’t grow anymore and nobody gets older. I told him the tentacles showed me my life story a hundred times over, and each time the movie gets a little fuzzier and I get a little sadder but I can’t really explain why. He puts a hand on my knee and tells me not to be afraid, and that the Black Sky comes for everybody and every world at one point or another, but that it’s good because it’s a renewal process that will give birth to a brighter, fuller world teeming with life and opportunity and joy and love. I try to look at the stranger but my eyes can’t really see anything that’s not the Black, and he just looks like a blurry, filtered shadow of a ghost from another time. He tells me I’m crying and I realize that I’m crying but I don’t know why. I’m not sad or happy or confused, I’m just—

Here the infection took over and the world went up in cinders. Fear gripped the masses like a great vice and squeezed until the survivors all killed each other or themselves in a rage against circumstance. I’m not sure what my name is, or was, or will be. I’m stretched thin, so thin, until I disappear. The deafening warble of a thousand universes colliding into me rattles my existence upon a frequency I’ve yet to encounter. It’s all black, but infused with an infinite multitude of color and texture packed densely into the four planes of dimension I once inhabited. The tunnel is a garbage chute and I’m barreling down it like a load of shit and bones, into the Great Funnel to be shit out again someplace else. It was not the eye of the Creator we were looking into. It was God’s asshole, and He’s an ouroboros with metaphysical teeth and an insatiable appetite for his own ass. An eternal cycle, the stranger said, we’d be passed around in an eternal cycle, and it was his job to make sure it kept going. I wish I had seen the face of God before I was unthreaded and siphoned into the center of the Black, spaghettified into impossibly long, atom-thin partitions all streaming forward, each an infinitesimal instance of immeasurable and indefinite pain as each noodle rocketed out of me and jettisoned into eternity. The last to go was my awareness, the subject of my existence. The Black made sure I felt it all before sweeping me under the great cosmic rug to be forgotten. But forgotten by whom? It occurred to me then, as the last iota of my consciousness drifted apart from the medium and joined the Black, that my life had only ever been a quest to forget myself.

Here the moonshine tastes like a parasite in the loch, like a gun under the seat, like a barrel of monkeys falling down a waterfall. The stranger told me his name… but I just can’t remember it now.