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| Consume (The Stand) - Inkjet Print, 42"W x 81" L |
No shadow trailed his boots now, the steel and cement skeleton stood as a blockage against the dying sunlight, Cale sitting on the dry side of a shriveled coronary. In the shadow the air came together and clung to his skin with its chill, stroking the back of his neck with its wraith’s hand. He slung his canvas pack on his shoulder, twenty pounds of anything could be in this bag, everything but his bullets. Cale learned like every other Easterner that you keep your bullets on your person at all times. His father imparted this with lessons that were almost commonplace – taping rounds to his stomach or placing them in whatever hole he could – lessons that were shorter and less painful the quicker you picked them up. Each bullet was a lifeline.
Calendars had stopped telling Cale when his father died, how many years ago it was. They even stopped reminding him of the date, or the month, or the year. The longer he spent on the road the easier it was to forget about all that, all the trappings of being a monster’s son. Before the calendars gave up, Titus had flexed his loins and produced Cale, practically only using his mother for the untidy birthing period. Everyone was like that for Titus, they were gripped and grappled and fucked until he saw results and then were cast aside. In the case of Cale’s mother, she died as his home burnt for the second time. Windy City burned for years.
Burned like this city will. Smoke drifted across the street, like a pale grey skyway dividing the earth from the heavens. There was a firebug here somewhere, trying to repeat the actions of nature, of God, of whoever. With the sun setting so fast over the clawing mountaintops, it would be unlikely for Cale to be beyond the city limits before the true burning began. Getting out of these dead walls was a large part of his schedule, getting to the tunnels and mountains beyond was larger.
The tunnels. Sent out after this freak, Cale would only get whispers to guide him, occasional droplets of providence that would come in dreams or memories, but were meant to point him like a bloodhound. He heard the tunnels two nights prior, the old sound of tunnels not the silence that suffocated them now. Instead of a heavy and dull void, tunnels used to be places of egress, chasms full of calamity and metal and this is what he heard. He heard the screech of wheels and the chatter of engines and people, the echo of every sound off of tiled walls coupled with the weak buzz of the Old Lights. He knew the Old sounds and would be one of very few people left who could place it.
The smoke grew thicker as he moved on, convinced now that he would have to spend a night here, at risk of being broiled by some hapless crazy who just wanted to cook himself alive. Even with the city having died two or three times, burning out once or twice, things would still catch and the fire would consume like a scavenger the parts that needed to be cleansed. Cale had no intention of being in the purging flames’ way.
He found where he would take shelter, a place that would not burn, but would remain wet and dark for the rest of its time in life. The black metal signpost that kept surviving called this place the East 14th Station, numbers and names that meant little to Cale as he lightly crept down the concrete stairs. Each step sucked up light from the fading dusk and shadows from abandoned playthings crisscrossed the walls.
The darkness drank him in like a dry sponge and as the steps counted twenty five he had to slow to a nearly forwardless crawl. His feet dryly kicked debris from the steps as he neared the bottom.
Better blind in darkness than blind in death, he thought, grimly imagining his sizzling and popping eyeballs as he was wrapped in flames during sleep. Seeing his corpse in the perfect detail of his imagination was not helping in the black. The painting in his mind was so clear on the blank canvas of his sight, unhindered with his true perception. The scratch and drag of pebbles or dust drift out from the void ahead of him. Cale ends his snail’s pace and holsters his gun, knowing how useless it will be in the dark. Instead, he brandishes a hard black club from beneath his heavy jacket.
A nightstick, he thinks, remembering what this weapon was once called. A billyclub, riot baton, all of those names which mean nothing now. The familiar grip of the smooth black surface comforts Cale in a way his gun could not; unseen in the pitch is how dented and worn the business end of the club is, battered and broken from an uncountable amount of uses. Cale is wrapped in these memories, times of triumph as he wielded this club like a king’s sword.
The weapon came to Cale in better times, when his were some of the only boots that walked forgotten streets. The Old Ones left their toys about and within one of their ancient vehicles marked POLICE – letters that meant nothing to him then – did he find this weapon, clutched by a near-dust mummy of its former owner. It had been polished black in those times, unscarred or fettered by use and its grip was unusual and clumsy. It was, at the time, a simple tool for breaking windows, locks or testing floorboards and jams. It took Cale years to grow into the billyclub as a weapon, days and weeks and months of bringing the Stick to bear on men, women and freaks who thought they would have the advantage in close-quarters. The Stick always protected him, it kept him safe from harm and promised those with ill gazes the fate of those punished long ago.
Its weight in his hands now, twirling until it fit snugly up against the outside of his forearm, was a sign that he was being careful – extra careful. Having to use the Stick meant he was in a predicament, always leading to a unthinkable brawl where he felt the cracking bones of the bodies of his foes and his own damaged limbs with each thud that was planted with practiced aim.
He continued down. The setting sun long lost above, Cale took each step with care, crunching unknown detritus beneath his boots and sliding them along the concrete steps with a light shiffffft before stepping down further. At the bottom he can feel the debris pile up at his feet, pressing against his boots from all sides like stepping into a landfill. There is another presence in the hole, in what used to be this tunnel and Cale could feel it watching him, draping him in the velvet of its perverse gaze and licking its lips as if to taste each and every part of him.
He slows his breathing to hear more clearly the sound of this squatter.
At first its movements are small and hesitant, but grow with confidence until they sound like di being cast on the floor or a rapid cracking of knuckles. Empty and hollow ligaments drag across the concrete and push aside the trash to bear upon him.
Stick at the ready, the pattern of movement picks up to his left, then his right, behind him on the stairs and all around. Whatever is down here is not alone.
The dead shuffle is punctuated with a horrendous chatter, “You’re the one they call John Doe,” squeals the darkness, a high-pitched whisper that stutters with excitement. “Y-Y-You’re Mr.Vanilla, the Normal Man. Y-Y-You’re M-M-Mr. All Right. Have you c-c-c-come to do me in, John Doe?” He can hear the smile on the face of this speaker, a grin of satisfaction as it goads him. This place is not a place of passage anymore, it’s the lair of the speaker, a stage for his satisfaction.
“I seek refuge and passage here, no quarrel with you, speaker.” Cale slowly brings his free hand to his canvas bundle. Guided by touch he pulls out a single orange cylinder – narrow and almost a foot long - hoping the speaker won’t be able to identify it.
Its cackle threatens to snap the bones at his feet, closer now, always closer, “You are the und-d-doing of many! John Doe! Last stop!” The whisper thunders to a witch’s cackle, heeeeeehehehehe and Cale snaps the live end of the flare, flooding the once bustling space with a harsh orange fluorescence and acrid pink smoke.
He is surrounded. Not three feet from him stand dead and paltry versions of the men and women who died in this place. Skeletons and corpses have regained their footing to make a ring of bone and putrescence all within arms range. What flesh remains on these puppets is dried and tattered like the mummy from whom Cale liberated the Stick, the smell of it finally reaches him and breeds with the flare creating a sulfur-coated gas of festering waste that Cale can feel coat him with a slime.
In the same motion of cracking the flare, he brings the Stick around to open the skulls of the first two skeletons he can see. The empty craniums explode in a dusty corona of marrow, hanging over the headless like a wedding-vale as they fall, once again, limp to the floor. They claw at his long coat as he heads deeper into the darkness, exposing ever more of the returned dead with the searing blaze of his flare. His expert right hand brings the Stick around in the movements of a swordsman and shatters the desperate arms of another ivory doll. Each time the Stick makes contact, it crushes the dry and aged bone underneath it, but each time a skeleton falls more rise to the challenge, an endless swarm of bones.
This place was once a station for the Old Ones, a place where they boarded underground trains and could travel quickly between its hubs. A subway. The word blinks meaninglessly into Cale’s mind as he swings the Stick down onto another empty skull. Few others would know the name for this place and judging from how brittle each of the undead is, Cale would venture that no one had been into the depths of this place in decades. The power shut off for the Old Ones machines centuries beforehand, rendering even their most simplistic trinkets useless. In books that recorded the progress of their great thinkers, Cale saw devices that could send information to someone miles away, a machine that could take a whole piece of fruit and yield nothing but juice and small grey boxes that would tell you exactly where you were in the world, down to the inch. The great thinkers, though, were always pushing farther and farther. They put machines in the sky and sunk them to the depths to find greater and more fantastic ways to use the lights and sounds of machinery, to dazzle the masses into thinking it was progress, but instead these people lie at Cale’s feet as dry heaps of forgotten names. If he dropped the flare, he was quite sure they would go up in flames.
That, he mused, is not a terrible idea. Even with the grim faces of death closing around him, Cale cocked back his left arm and let fly the fire-crowned cylinder, planting it in the eye socket of another of the undead.
Its face ignited in a brilliant green jet of flame that whistled through the cracks in its skull like a train horn or a dying scream. It continued to absently pursue Cale without regard for its fellows as its doused them in lime-colored fire. Half of the closing ring was consumed in the time it took to register his plan a success. The shambling wall of bones was instead a flickering barrier of screaming flames, the phoenix returned. Cale smashed through the disintegrating skeletons and brought his coat up to bear against the flames as he sprinted through their numbers.
Headed not for the stairs, but deeper into the Speaker’s lair, Cale found in the growing limelight a pair of steel doors that opened into some sort of metal room. The heat from the scorched remains of his skeletal entourage grew stronger as his fingers fumbled to fit between the doors.
The fiery horde fell upon him. The embrace of the combusting dead like the welcome hug that sinners receive in Hell.
“Come on!” He bellowed to the door, trying to ignore the smell of his burning hair and the closeness of the flames with only his coat and canvas bag between them. His fingers found purchase and he wrenched open the sliding doors. The metal cried in resistance, rusty tracks screaming their frustration and Cale stumbled inside, still gripped by two of the now wickermen. Still before flinging them off, he turns to dust a trio of blackened skeletons that scramble against each other to fit in the door. The tail of his coat is fully on fire and licking at the back of his denim pants, the hollow jaws of the wickermen plant themselves all over Cale’s shoulders and neck, leaving cauterized crescents and bald spots of smoldering hair.
The door, the door, he repeats to himself, knowing that the longer it stays open, the worse it gets. He plants his faded boots against some sort of metal seat and forces the doors to shut, crying out as they did before, snapping the space between himself and the Speaker’s army shut like the thin door to a predator’s cage. Except this time, Cale is in the cage and he is not the predator. Finally he can fling off his smoldering coat and watch the clinging skeletons fight to stay standing as his weight disappears. Before their fiery remains can strike the metal floor of the car, Cale plants his foot into each of their empty face, shattering what was left of the men and women who wanted nothing but to end him.
He quickly pats himself down, panting and nearly heaving at the smoke that fills the small car. Nothing is too badly injured and the bites he suffered were effectively sealed by the flames. Should either of those teeth have carried with it some infection, he could be in a spot, but other things were more present to threaten his life.
Outside the steel doors, the parade of corpses steadily threw itself into the barrier, headless of how each skeleton exploded on impact, but slowly bowing the door inward. The glow outside began to die faster, but the undead pressed on.
“Oh, J-J-John Doe! How you spurn me so!” The Speaker’s cadence comes from all around, as if the car itself vibrates with his voice. “C-C-Come out! K-K-Keep dancing! I’M NOT FINISHED WITH YOU YET!” In the last line the Speaker’s voice shifts to a deep growl, roaring like the train cars of the Old Ones used to. Its thunderous desire was waiting right outside those doors.
