lovely bones of broken hills,
calloused hands and candles of grim,
blurry smokes and voices of thrill:
come hither;
for I wish to kill.

Tales of Blood

Scintillating falls of crooning gold
delving in jars of dissipated cold:
rest my soul in tales of blood,
Before the angels char my name.

Dear December

Pink Blossoms dancing along with the wind,
purple skies following hollow footprints.
Clogged blood flowing down the drain;
dear December, I heard you killed again?

We’d have our time with them
Knowing we’d be safe just past the city limits.
They were unable to leave, and
They knew this.

They adhered to their law of fear.
Hell, they were just as afraid of us,
If not more, for
They had faces just like ours
And they couldn’t stand to see
Us like that.

We were despair to them.

We eventually stopped going back
Because we grew up, got married, got
New jobs, had children, but
We thought about what would have happened
If we kept returning.

It made our stoic faces carve foreign expressions.

Some time later, I spotted one outside
Just running along—like a dog
After an invisible car.

I watched this creature with my face
Disappear as I sat in a chair, watching
The valley in the distance catch fire.
It burned until the sky smoldered
Into an ash pit.

You should have known me when I was on top of the game. Morphing was still new and few artists had mastered it. Not everyone could handle the drugs that would transform you into a piece of art a Collector would be proud to hang on the wall. We were a small group, known to the gallery owners and dealers, and cultivated, like rare hothouse flowers. There were parties loaded with the best Stimuli (especially the music, either tingling or throbbing) to trigger a Morph that would be as interesting and innovative as possible.

Oh, those parties! When you could hardly remember what you were when you came in and could barely recognize yourself when you came out. It took days to get back to your usual self, but who cared? If the Morph was successful and you sold, there was a nice fat contract —six months to a year—waiting for you with your dealer. The perks were there too, as most likely you’d be living in some penthouse or estate, with the best food and drink, all expenses paid, and a staff to wait on you at all times.

So, what happened, you want to know? Why am I hanging in a place like this? Well, when I tell you the story, it will become clear.

I had just come off a year of hanging in a mountain retreat somewhere in Colorado, tanned and relaxed and feeling refreshed. Ready for the next Morph, back in New York, where the best Collectors were, and represented by one of the top galleries. My dealer, Hans, an expert at the game, was adept at teasing multiple buyers or establishing a new trend, which ironically, only his artists could fulfill.

I had a nice, loft-like apartment on Tenth Street in the Village, stocked with ample supply of morphizine and art books, my only treasures. The Cubist and Futurist movements of the early 1920s were my sources of inspiration, and influenced my Morph, making it distinctive from most of the other artists. My unique talent was Fragmenting, projecting my fragmented self onto different planes, taking Cubism from two dimensions to three, sure to excite the most elite of the sophisticated Art Collectors.

Hans had scheduled a top-tier Collector’s party, a showcase for his high-ticket Morph Artists. Grabbing a two-pack of morphizine, I donned my black shiny raincoat and was on my way. The black pavement was shiny after a drizzle and my stiletto-heeled retro pumps clicked loudly across it as I followed the route to the warehouse site of tonight’s gallery party.

“The biggest Collectors will be coming, Liebchen,” Hans had gotten me into the habit of referring to Collectors as their own special entity with a capital ‘C’. Big Collectors were very busy and very rich, but in pursuit of their Collection they tended to come early and stay late, wanting to be certain of the art that caught their attention, before committing their millions to a purchase.

However, that night, at least, I was game—and if took a little more morphizine than usual, so be it. I was healthy, relaxed, and felt I could easily handle a full night of Morphing.

Wandering around by myself, (Hans was too cheap to pay for added chaperones for Morphing artists) I finally found a dressing room, where I disrobed, took out my syringe and sat on a rickety chair to shoot up the morphizine.

If you’ve never taken morphizine, you can’t imagine the initial rush as it sets your cells up to Morph. It leaves you feeling you’ve had a small taste of paradise. (By the way, in those days I scored the best morphizine you could get; the crap I get now barely gives me the same kind of buzz).

How does it work, you ask? I’m not totally sure, but one time a doctor tried to explain it to me:

Your DNA is like the instruction book for your genes, much like the instruction book that comes with a Lego set. Evidently, the DNA tells the genes and cells of your body how to structure itself, and how all the little tiny pieces should come together. Then, some scientist discovered that DNA can be altered, and with the injection of a new drug into the bloodstream and the right stimulus to activate it, it can direct cells to change the body’s structure.

Initially, the drug was used to retool the DNA and restructure the genes of people who were born with disabilities caused by missing or non-functioning genes. With the success of this application, the excitement of more possibilities grew, after scientists discovered that some people were more responsive than others to DNA-change. These people had genes which were dynamic and would bind and move quickly and easily once the drug and the stimulus were administered, and experienced few, if any, side effects. Oddly enough, those who responded so well to the drug had a high creative instinct and became Morph Artists.

Since there were no serious side effects to taking the drug now known as morphizine, it was made easily available to Responders, although artists have to take a blood test to confirm their response everytime they refill a prescription for morphizine. 

So here I was, eyes closed as I reveled in the euphoria produced by the first rush of morphizine into my veins, and I took my time before getting up and into the Morph. Even without Stimuli like music or flashing lights, my body was beginning to morph. My fingers extended into tendrils, turning green, and my hair began to grow into vines, encircling my body. Feeling good, I slithered out of the dressing area to where the music caused the floor to throb, while trying to control my feet from morphing, until I got to the heart of the party.

I followed the throbbing floor to a white metal door, which was a struggle to open with my fingers already morphed into tendrils. I stepped onto a painted metal catwalk surrounding a giant fish tank filled with colored oozing things. The music made both my legs and the catwalk vibrate with its syncopation, and I had to concentrate to prevent the Morphfrom rearranging my cells randomly to the rhythm. It not only took the right DNA, but self-control to direct the Morph into the kind of art a Collector would appreciate.

I climbed down the ladder into the tank, and let the warm water engulf me. Concentrating on fragmenting, not angular but smooth. My tendrils stretched and diversified into more branches through the pulsating water.

With the disintegration of your usual form, it takes the power of imagination to reshape every cell in your body. As the Morph progresses, the connection between consciousness and emotion grows fuzzy, and oblivion sets in. It’s important you understand this now, so you’ll understand what happened later.

I remained in a semi-conscious state until 4:00 am when, at last, the morphizine began to wear off. The water in the tank had grown cold and goopy, and I tried to avoid oozing forms clinging to the walls as my tendrils slithered upwards. With a shiver that shook my entire form, I emerged, restored to my natural shape. However, the Morph was now stamped into my brain, and at the right price, I’d recreate it for the Collector who wanted to buy it.

Hans was waiting for me when I exited the dressing room, a big smile on his professionally reconstructed face. “Well, you did it this time, Cecilia,” he said as he kissed me on both cheeks, “You’ve caught the big fish. The biggest Collector of Modern Art of the western world, Sir Giles McCullen.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, skeptical.

Hans patted his jacket pocket. “Got the contract right here, already signed by the Collector and now ready for your signature.”

Landing in the art collection of Sir Giles McCullen, one of the richest men in the world, was the ticket to stardom. Sir Giles was a leading Collector, and an influencer, and I was to be his first Morph acquisition.

Han’s answer to my next question of, “How much?” staggered me with its outrageously high amount. His surgically enhanced facial muscles strained as they widened into the biggest grin I’d ever seen him attempt. Grabbing the papers he offered, I did a quick scan, looking for the location and start date. Two days! Not much time to get a full supply of morphizine, but, luckily, the location was a penthouse apartment on Park Avenue, not some lonely far-off estate, so delivery from a nearby pharmacy would be feasible.

“Wait a minute. It’s only a 3-month contract!” I looked up angrily, “what’s with that? I thought we don’t do samples.”

Hans tented his fingers before his face, “He likes to rotate his art and allows nothing to hang for more than a month or two. For Sir Giles McCullen, you’ll do three months or whatever time he wants, capisce? You’re getting the three because you’ll be his first Morph Art, and I convinced him he should take more time with it. The good news is that after he’s done with a piece, he usually makes sure to pass it along to another prestigious Collector. So, you’re far from being left out in the cold. This will turn into a never-ending gig. Promise.”

Oh, well. Hans was as ambitious as I was, and would ensure the commissions would keep rolling in.

Within two days, I found myself in the stark white entry of Sir Gile’s penthouse on Park Avenue. My contract required me to hang for about 6 hours a day, beginning at seven o’clock in the evening when Sir Giles got home, and ending when he retired to his bedroom, at around one in the morning.

For my off-hours, I had been given a cozy large room with a private bath, with big picture windows framing a stunning view of Manhattan. The lap of luxury and the kind of life I’d always imagined, complete with an efficient and courteous staff to tend to my every need.

You’ve heard of Sir Giles McCullen, haven’t you? Want to know what he was like before the murder, don’t you? Well, I couldn’t tell you. I never spoke to him, and he never spoke to me.

Usually, Collectors couldn’t stop asking about the Morph, because it was the one experience they couldn’t buy. Even if they were to shoot up a ton of morphizine, there’s no way to force a Morph; it was all up to the DNA.

Sir Giles, however, seemed to have no desire to know more about the Morph, and the only reaction I got out of him was a lift of an eyebrow on the first day he sat down to dinner and noticed me on the opposite wall.

Sir Giles may have initially been attracted to my creation, the fragmenting of the physical plane and the creation of tendrils that glinted, mercurial and ephemeral, in different lights. Though he lacked understanding of Morph Art, he obviously had been informed of the need for continued Stimulus to maintain it and arranged a full-spectrum light show along with pulsating music to play during the hours I was scheduled to be on the wall.

In my off time, I kept busy by meandering around the apartment or swimming in the infinity pool on the terrace. Occasionally, Sir Giles would see me in my ordinary human form, but his face never registered a flicker of recognition nor the inclination to speak to me. When I wasn’t on his wall, I was invisible, just like everything else in his household.

In that vast complex, servants and assistants were ever ready to receive his orders, and they too were treated as invisibles. It was not intentional or derogatory; it was just Sir Giles. He had a lack of interest in anything once collected, and anyone already on his payroll.

Except for a beautiful man. Many know of his obsession with Michelangelo’s David, and it was rumored he’d purchased it, although was persuaded to leave it where it was, in the museum in Florence. It was also whispered that Sir Giles seemed to have a passion for collecting a living embodiment of Michaelangelo’s artistic ideal and had many flings with David-like young men, who all signed non-disclosure agreements, of course.

Now, let me set the stage for Sir Giles’ final night on earth.

I was hanging in my spot in the dining room when Sir Giles came home at his usual time, accompanied by a tall, blond, perfectly proportioned young man who looked like he had been chiseled out of ice. Sir Giles was in constant movement, picking up a glass, pouring a drink, tinkling the ice. He tapped his fingers repeatedly on the side table not more than two feet from where I hung, but he ignored me, didn’t even try to show me off to his guest. He did not acknowledge the staff or the dinner they laid out for him and his guest on the long dining table.

Sir Giles was in his late fifties, with graying hair, and he sported a beard that hid the lower half of his face. He could not take his eyes off the young blond man, as if he were some new treasure to be added to his collection.

Reality gets hazy when you’re into a Morph, but I remember snippets of the evening. I could see the young man, as he tried repeatedly to engage Sir Giles in conversation and waited and waited for some response. After absolutely no reaction, his guest reached for knife and fork and began to dig into his dinner.

While in the middle of a Morph, your senses feel like they are on overload. Waves of disgust and disappointment were emanating from Sir Giles. He must have said something to the young man, who paused for the first time in his eating. Rising slowly, I could see the glint of the knife clutched so tightly in his hand, and felt the anger, like a hot wind, simmering from the young man. Although my senses were in high alert, my consciousness was not, and so when the young man began to shout at Sir Giles, with the knife still in his hand, I could not summon any muscle to react or even to open my mouth.

If Sir Giles noticed the knife or the young man’s anger, he did not seem to react to it, and instead, reached for a tumbler, poured something into it, and offered it to the young man to drink. The young man took it and downed it in one gulp, then wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his white shirt, leaving a faint brown stain.

Sir Giles turned away to the window. The turmoil of emotions surging from the young man was so powerful, it caused new branches to sprout from my tendrils, which inched down the walls towards the source of the sensation. The young man came closer to Sir Giles, who suddenly turned and struck him full across the face. Stunned, a red splotch appeared on his cheek, and he placed a hand on the mark, as if feeling for damage. Suddenly, the young man’s arms shot out, and then in a flash, Sir Giles was propelled through the picture window with a trailing scream.

I was too far into the Morph to pull myself off the wall or call out for the staff or reach for the phone to summon the police. It took all my willpower and control to prevent myself from Morphing to the waves of fear and anger blasting from the young man. He still had not noticed me as a live person, though he came close enough to me on the wall to hear him snarl. I watched helplessly as he grabbed a tabletop sculpture, and tossed it out the shattered window after Sir Giles.

Paralyzed, I was in my position, because aside from taking morphizine I had ingested a Fixative pill to keep the Morph in the exact position that Sir Giles had paid for. It was the Fixative, not the morphizine, which locked me in place, as I kept explaining to the authorities. Besides, I was in danger. The young brute could have taken me in his arms and tossed me out after the sculpture he just threw, and I would have been helpless to save myself.

Luckily for me, the servants must have had heard the window shatter, and they had called the police, who burst into the room, handcuffing the young man before he could get away.

After twenty-four hours, the Fixative and the morphizine was out of my system, and it was my turn to be interviewed by the police, who had already completed their discussions with the suspect and Sir Giles’ staff.

An eyewitness, wasn’t I, you say? What I saw should have put that young murderer away for good, but my testimony was discounted. The Defense Counsel turned the case against the Morph, and public opinion turned against me, as if I had committed a crime. They claimed I could have saved Sir Giles, but I was “under the influence of morphizine” and “in a state of disarrayed molecular structure” which disqualified me as “an individual capable of testimony”. In short, I was ruled to be an Object, since the Morph had deprived me of my humanity. Therefore, I was disqualified as a witness to an act of murder.

The press had a field day, and I’m surprised you don’t recall it. Artists like me were condemned for going to such extremes for the sake of newfangled creativity, demonstrating our defiance of basic ethics and standards of humanity.

There was a public debate, with vocal protests about the dangers and depravity of the Morph from one camp, and criticism of the judiciary for ruling an artist was no longer a member of the human race but an Object while in the midst of art performance, from the other.

“Accidental death” was the official ruling–not murder, and the beautiful but deadly young man got off with no charges filed against him. Wouldn’t you know, it turned out the young man was also an artist, a sculptor of some new technologically advanced non-melting ice? Now, with new notoriety and Hans representing him, he became the newest Art Star.

At Hans’s suggestion, I left town and he promised to get me back into circulation once the publicity died down. I should have known better than to trust Hans.The estate of Sir Giles McCullen paid out the rest of my contract, keeping me in some basic comfort as I waited for Hans to send me a new commission.

However, Hans was sad to inform me that my role in Sir Giles’s death, contrary to the judge’s ruling, had stirred the Collectors to realize the artist was not an Object, but a human being, who had a fly-on-wall-intimate view of their personal lives. Not an appealing thought to Collectors, who believed their wealth allowed them to indulge in anything they chose, secure in the privacy of their homes. The art they buy for their walls should tell no tales, but an artist hanging on their walls, no matter how altered their physical shape, was seen as an invasion of their privacy.

My short-term exile became a long one. Outside of New York, there were still wanna-be Collectors who still wanted to get in on Morph Art, so I found work for a time. Then, like everything else in the art world, the Morph went completely out of fashion. Nowadays, I can count my Morph gigs on the fingers of one hand, and with morphizine so much harder to come by, it’s probably time for me to retire.

That’s my story, so have another drink, on me. I bet it’s not every day you meet a witness to a famous murder, even a discredited one.

That’s why I landed here, an oddity, in this rundown, godforsaken bar in Newark. No matter what I see, and man, I can tell you, I see a lot, does it really matter in the long run? No one’s buying it.

The motorboat skids across the water, wings of bubbles and froth skating behind them. Richter looks around him, sees the group which he has been with for the last couple of years. Leon and Jane are reliable, and Richter tolerates their company, which probably borders on friendship. It is more than he could ask for. Sometimes he wonders if they would ever be friends outside of this line of work. They have all come into this contract in financial dire straits for some reason or another, enough to warrant leveraging their lives. This is also a dangerous job, both psychologically and physically. It takes about six months to locate one of these husks and another three months of planning. Only then can they strip the derelict ships with enough confidence and competence to do it right, serving as a reminder all the while how cruel people can be to one another. Yes, Richter thinks, perhaps it’s good to have friends.

The actors do not matter, but during World War II one country developed a deadly strain and infected a large group of sailors (some willing, others not) that masqueraded as a merchant ship. Once docked, they would hug, shake, mate, and infect the population within the forty-eight hours they had, until their hearts literally exploded and erupted fiery blood from their gullet like a burst pipe. It was a virological Trojan Horse. Toss aside the more direct atomic bombs, inflict a pandemic on your enemies. And it worked. And then other countries started doing it. Before long no one was expecting any unsolicited trade coming from international waters. All those Trojan (sea)horses had to turn back or be hit with napalm on the spot. Thus the husks, now aimlessly ricocheting along the aquatic perimeters of a country, knocking about like a drooling child. At first, it was the NGOs that paid to get them removed from the ocean, then it became merchant unions who held the purse, and now, as Richter, Leon, and Jane approach the underside of the Lotus, it is a mix of war profiteers who want the dormant and dead radioactive plants back and pharmaceutical companies that want to manufacture the cure for any dormant strains, still scratching on the human genome like pesky branches against a bedroom window. Richter gave up on morals when they started to name their price.

The Lotus is a metal behemoth, barnacled with rust and ill intent. Richter scales the starboard hull with a levy and then helps Leon and Jane onto the dock. Jane carries the glass container meant to hold the dried, brittle petals of these cancerous plants. Long dormant and no longer infectious to humans, certain invested parties have developed technology to revive their stymies. It is all science hokum that Richter does not know and cares not to learn. They walk along the empty shell of the starboard side. Like all the other ships, it is not built to be empty. The unnatural loftiness of the balconies, the main deck, the interweaving hallways distort space/time. Something is not right about the Lotus, but something never is with these ships.

These Trojan Horses always keep their plants in a special vault with expensive lamps to emulate sunlight. It is as secure as a bank vault, but with steady hands and the aided passage of time to accumulate rust, these vaults only required patience, of which Jane has droves. The ships are all built differently, but these vaults are always in the center, acting as the heart that infected the air of every sailor who charts a map, smokes a cigarette, or eats in the mess hall. Richter stopped wondering what it would be like to envision their days, so benign with endless sea, their bodies disintegrating from the inside out. For those who went willingly, did they consider themselves martyrs?

Leon marks the wall with luminescent blue chalk within the bowels of the Lotus. Every ten minutes he lights a flare that illuminates the dark caverns of the ship with a ruby glaze. The ship rocks on the water. Up… down… up… down. Industrial flashlights illuminate only a cone in front of them, but they are of good quality and did the job. A thin layer of sea water nips at the heels of their boots.

“Here,” Jane says, stopping them, “it’s here.”

She goes to work wordlessly, bringing out her tools to identify weak points in the vault. She scrapes off a cluster of oysters like shingles, pounding away at the barnacles that fuse the cinch and axis of the vault. Her hammering sends sharp metallic arrows through the halls, like a penny being dropped down a mineshaft. Within minutes the door creaks open, falling at first into its hinges and the salty film of water at their feet, and then props against the wall with the combined strength of Richter and Leon. Like clockwork.

Jane sets her industrial flashlight into the corner and rummages into her bag for a vile and a pair of tweezers. Her hands are surgeon’s hands, and at one point she was a doctor at a respected hospital before saving the life of a drug lord, and then ended up being a personal retainer. Such was her trajectory before finding her way here, sloshing through stale water and over barnacles, navigating through ghost ships. It is a simple task: pluck the dried stems of the virulent flower, put them in a container, and deliver it via a series of anonymous exchanges.

The Lotus rocks along the water. A wave pushes against her rusted hull, sending a metallic groan through the darkness.

“It’s not here,” Jane said, unemotive.

“Come again?” Leon says. He flashes his industrial light on the pedestal, cruising a circle of yellow along the remains of the vault as he does so. “It’s not like it could have gone anywhere.”

Richter hears sloshing at the far end of the hall, the sound of what seems like feet going in and out of water. Another metallic thump. He ignores this. It is always unpleasant being in these husks of ships. Thoughts of his part of the fee are the only motivator for stewing in this briny environ, smelling decaying fish and the earthy, slimy smell of long rotted and bloated bodies. Now that Richter thinks of it, they usually saw bodies float in the hallways in these ships, bloated and red, sometimes half eaten by crabs. Sometimes, when the ships are positioned at an angle, the bodies float on top of one another in a cluster of mangled limbs like discarded planks, loose skin still clinging on them like algae. This is probably the case, he thinks, hearing the water slosh outside the vault again.

“Look harder,” Leon says.

“If it’s not here, it’s not here,” Jane argues. Then she turns to them both, a sign that she is done trying to investigate the absence of the virulent flower, “let’s turn back.”

Richter shakes his head, “If we turn back, not only will we not be paid, but our reputation will be at stake. We need to look harder.”

“Perhaps it floated away,” Leon says, “no other explanation.”

Another metallic clang. Eerily calm debris skating through necrotic water. Leon is about to say something else, but Richter holds up a hand, listening not just for the illusion of feet trotting their water like their own, but for the pattern to prove it. It is there, slowly, as if the noise materializes and knows it is being listened to. Richter can make out a pattern, but this is broken by a series of loud clangs and, to his shock, a grunt. He looks to the others to confirm that they hear the sound, but their faces already tell him that he is not going crazy.

“Maybe it was taken already,” Richter says.

“I didn’t see any boats on the radar when we approached,” Leon says.

“Maybe they aren’t on the radar,” Jane adds, securing the empty airtight vile in her backpack.

Richter draws his pistol and the others followed suit. They step out of the vault and move in tandem with one another. Ghastly smells of rotted fish and crabs permeate the cavernous hallways. Richter figures this is what it is like being in a can of tuna fish. They came across a fork, and when they flashed light on either path, there was no difference; only the rhythm of the water at their ankles, a line of crabs scuttering in both directions on the wall, paint marks of algae growing over the unblinking and dead stares of fish. To their left, they hear another grunt amidst a scutter of sloshy steps, and the three of them engage in pursuit down the hall which leads into darker depths into the undercarriage of the Lotus. They have never needed to go into the lower docks of these ships before. It is of no interest to the three of them, and any more minutes spent in this aquatic mausoleum are better spent literally elsewhere. Yet they went in pursuit of their bounty, taking precarious steps down slippery, barnacle-crusted stairs as if their lives depend on it. It does.

Another sound to their right and Richter aims his flashlight down the hall. There, in a kaleidoscope frame of orange rust, silver fish scales, and black oyster shells, a figure stands, pale and nonplussed by the sudden light. It is a male, his skin so taut it looks like it clings to just his bones and nothing more. He wears a suit and button-up shirt that are heavily disheveled and splotched, brown, and green like makeshift camo. Water brushes against bare ankles with skin swollen and cracked, weeping blood over the salt-irritated open wounds like lines of cartography. He has a crab in his hand, its shell punctured with the white meat throbbing both in its exposed body and the man’s fingertips. Clumps of it dribble from his lips.

“Listen,” Richter begins, “we don’t care who you are or who your buyer is. Hand it over.”

“You’ve got it,” Leon says.

The man looks at the three of them, tilts a bald head with strands of silver sprouting like a weed. His eyes are blank, like those of a fish. Slowly, absently, he takes some meat from the feebly snapping crab and shoves it into his mouth, where he proceeds to chew not with his teeth but with his lips.

“Bring us the flower,” Richter says.

“Flower,” the man says, his voice sounding as if dragged through gravel. With gnarled and dry fingers dotted with crab coagulate, he points down the hall, deeper into the threshes. He repeats, “Flower.”

And then he is off down the hall, frantically splashing in the ankle-deep water, necrotic toes dipping into sewage and bacterial orgies. Richter rushes after him, his breathing suddenly labored by the enclosed space. Leon and Jane follow suit, lighting the way with their heavy-duty flashlights, rocking the circles up and down like an erratic buoy. The skeletal man discards the half-eaten crab over a shoulder and Richter smacks it away with the butt of his pistol. He chases the man two lefts, then a right, calling occasionally to the others so they can all help navigate their pursuit.

He turns a corner and stops short. The man is in front of a locked door, the remaining wisps of hair looking like antennas. He looks over his shoulder, sniffs at an oyster which has clung to his suit and knocks on the door.

“Flower,” he says again, his shaking eyes focusing on the sudden light of Leon and Jane’s more powerful bulbs. The corneas are hazy, and his nostrils flare like a curious beast above a mouth of broken glass.

With Leon and Jane at his side, Richter admits to himself that he felt a little better. He keeps his pistol aimed at the man, who waits in front of the door. The iron turnstile in front of the door opens with a powerful start and settles into a creaking rhythm. The door pushes inward and in the shadow another man appears, holding one hand over his eyes and squinting. He too is wearing a suit, but his clothes are less destroyed than the wraith’s. His skin, too, is the color of an elephant’s tusk.

He says half whistling, “Oh, Mr. Jiminy, what have you brought us?”

Richter says, “We’ve come for the flower.”

“Flower,” Mr. Jiminy says. He starts to giggle.

The man lowers his hand, blinks several more times to adjust to the light, and says, “Come in, come in. You’re letting in the stink.”

“You come out,” Leon says.

He appears more cognizant than Mr. Jiminy, acknowledging the three pirates with their lights and weapons. Trash and fish skeletons pushed up against the raised lip of the door.

The man speaks as if they knocked on his front door. “Now is not the time for that. You’ve come for the flower, yes?”

“We have guns,” Richter says, “we aren’t afraid to shoot.”

The man opens the door wider, revealing a maw of eternal black. He stands in front of it, framed by the oval perimeter of the threshold, like a man at the edge of the shore. Mr. Jiminy stares dumbly at them, splashing in the water.

He says, “If you are here for the virulent strain like I think you are, you know that shooting me will release the virus. You’d die before you made it back to wherever you’ve come from. But let me introduce myself. My name is Helmut Werzig, apprentice cartographer for the S.S. Lotus.”

“Apprentice cartographer?” Jane says.

Werzig grimaces, “Well, only cartographer. I try to be respectful. Come inside. It’s dry. We’ll give you the flower.”

Richter looks to Leon and Jane. He nods, they nod back. He says, “We’re keeping our guns.”

“I would hope so,” Werzig said, “it’s the only logical way. But we intend to be your friend.”

“We?” Jane says.

“We,” Werzig echoes.

Slowly, gingerly, Richter leads the way through the drowned hall. The ship rocks sheepishly, swishing the discarded wrappers and eyeballs from right to left and back again. The motion is more subtle here, being so deep into the ocean. Richter keeps his attention on Werzig, even as he approaches the clattering and giggling Mr. Jiminy, who stinks worse than he looks. Mr. Jiminy, Richter realizes, is simply a frantic but docile creature. It feels like he is passing the gaze of a child.

When the three of them step through the threshold, Werzig situated himself in the gap. “Not you,” he says to Mr. Jiminy.

Werzig shuts the door behind them, fastening it with laborious grunts before setting off into an even speed. Their circles of illumination only show parts of the room, fragments of a greater picture. In their three cycloptic visages, they saw tables, used sets of cards, and cups.

Werzig warns, “I’m turning on the lights now.”

The room blossoms into illumination with a sharp click. They are in a breakroom or a lounge area. Iron tables bolt to the floor along with metal chairs that resist the sway of a boat. Old electronics and amenities like a microwave and refrigerator take up space in the corner kitchenette, emitting an aura of neglect. The sink is bone dry. To the right are magazines and a lounge area. The magazines are crinkly from water bloat and the colors of the covers are faded with the briny water. Outside the steel door, Richter hears Mr. Jiminy padding away into parts unknown, no longer interested, nor seemingly offended, by his exclusion.

A phonograph is playing old-time jazz amidst the undercurrent of creaking metal. The place smells of heavily applied disinfectant, but this only serves to mask the stale, acrid smell of what only reminds Richter of a hospice. Werzig waits for them to repackage their flashlights, unperturbed that their pistols are kept out, before gesturing for them to follow.

Werzig begins, “Half of us believed in our country, the other half were cattle. Only those who went onto the Lotus willingly understood the virulent strain that turned the ship, and by extension their bodies, into a plague-bringing trojan horse. Oh, what pandemonium our sister ships brought to governments, what chaos they brought to the kings who choked on our blood.”

“There are no kings anymore,” Leon says, “not even during your time, either.”

Werzig stops, looks at his hands. “There will always be kings, sir. The world just calls them something different.”

“How are you all still alive? We hadn’t expected anyone to be in this ship,” Jane says.

“You expected to see a drowned prison full of bloated bodies, no?” Werzig says, “I cannot answer why some of us survived. Our medic has befallen an accident in the beginning. Consumed by those whose minds shattered in the first wave. They say all problems in a ship start with the kitchen.”

The three of them exchange glances. Already Richter is losing patience. He pictures Mr. Jiminy hunched over a cluster of crabs and barnacles, his feet entangled in briny seaweed, stupidly staring at the flashing colors with his milky eyes.

Werzig shepherds them through the cabin, which is an interconnected and seemingly preserved series of rooms. Some of the rooms remain as they are: bunks, latrines, rec rooms. The mess hall is a modest room meant to accommodate shifts of sailors, and it is small but contains an array of crabs, oysters, and flayed fish. They are all dead and simply organized, a display of higher cognitive function which gives Richter comfort.

Werzig continues, “Oh, it’s been hard for the past couple of decades. But the strain has done right by us, as we have done right by it. It has kept us young and spritely.”

He rounds a corner into another hallway. Now it is hard to triangulate exactly where they are in the ship, this once thought to be abandoned colossus. Werzig brings them to the heart of the domicile cabin, which is proceeded by the sudden introduction of light laughter and soft chatting, the clicking of lighters and following inhales, exhales. Richter exchanges glances with Jane and Leon. Have they really been surviving all along in this nautical mausoleum?

They pass open doors and in them, Richter feels himself being watched, even though none of the survivors of this strain seem to pay the three of them any mind. They all wear suits and dresses, much like Werzig, and have similar lacerations on the hems and shoulders, perpetual scabs of brine on the threads. Evidence of open sores on their pallid hands. In some rooms they dance and sway to the jazz music, couples embracing and pulling back as their hips swing. It is like a soiree, all contained in a seven-by-seven-foot space. A thin layer of water occupies some of the rooms, most likely from a leak between the walls with the rancid water outside. This seems to bother no one. In another room there sits a couple of people, faces unshaven but eyes focused, flipping through magazines and smoking long cigarettes. Barnacles creep up both the legs of the chair and their legs as if crystallizing both; a fusion of biomaterial.

Werzig brought them to a back room, which is the only locked space in this area. “You desire the flower, yes?”

“Yes,” Richter says.

He starts to open the door. It looks laborious, but the three of them make no effort to help.

“The flower is dead,” Werzig says, “but we are not.”

He opens the door into a small room. The lights are dimmer here, a marigold yellow. A cluster of people, about seven or eight, stand like totems on the floor. This too is waterlogged, although the murky water is void of any other living creatures or trash. They sway with the rhythm of the Lotus. Smears of green and red coagulate on the wall like a cluster of apostrophes and question marks. They stared aimlessly at their feet, shifting occasionally to the walls, twitching and scratching at themselves. Their attire is asynchronous with the likes of Mr. Werzig and the other survivors. Some wore flotation vests and windbreakers. When some of them turn, the light catches the carabiners still attached to their hips.

“What are we looking at?” Leon says.

Werzig answers, “The flower talks to us. It knows that it no longer lives in its base form. You will not be able to retrieve the flower because there is none. Instead, it lives with us, as vessels. For those who have become infected, the flower recognizes our drive to topple these kingdoms in the name of a bigger idea, bigger than ourselves. The flower understands this. The flower understands the need for propagation. In this sense, we are linked, each one of us here.”

“What about Mr. Jiminy?” Richter asks, “Are you linked with him and his madness too?”

“No,” Werzig says, offended, “his kind were slaves and prisoners, rapists and pedophiles. The kind we kept locked up. For us the flower was a gift, for them, these monsters in the old world, it was a penance. The flower rejected them. The virus ate away their minds like maggots, a psychic lobotomy. There is a point when we stopped needing traditional food, but they didn’t. They became ravenous, mindless creatures. Soon, they invaded our dreams, encroaching on the psychic unity the flower had given us. They are a virus within the virus. Hence the closed doors. Steel seems to help sever the connection to Mr. Jiminy and the others.”

“The others? There are more out there?” Leon says.

“It is a big ship, my pirate guests. Although I’m sure you already figured that out.”

“I don’t understand,” Jane says, addressing the swaying figures standing ankle-deep in the runoff, “these people… you keep them in the dark? Locked away? Are they like Mr. Jiminy, crazed, chaotic?”

Werzig shakes his head, “They were the crew that got here first.”

The totems idle stupidly, blank and absent. Their backs are cragged with split wounds. Saltwater drips the curves of their backs. A tangle of seaweed crawled up their arms and legs.

Werzig continues, “The flower wants us to propagate. Its strands have dried up and died because the hosts could not live. But we are stronger. We’ve embraced the flower and in turn, it has given us life. Now, it is time for the flower to leave this ship, just as intended.”

“What did you do to them?” Jane asks.

“We’re seeing if they turn into us, or them.”

Richter starts to back up. Briny water sloshes at his ankles. He raises a pistol to Werzig, alternating between his calm interior to the wraiths standing in the corners of the room. What has befallen their psyches to make them this way? They do not seem psychologically obliterated like the crab-eating wraiths lurking in the halls. They make noises that seem rudimentary, but with acknowledgement. This thought unnerves Richter, who does a quick cost/benefit calculation. He needs the money, as di Jane and Leon, but this… Richter feels as if he walked into a spider’s nest.

One of the wraiths turns, a tendril of drool trailing down its chin. Its eyes are milky, and it is bald. Richter cannot tell of the human that it once was. It looks almost batlike. He wants none of this. To exist in this drowned limbo is a fate worse than death. A barnacle pulses from its clavicle like an open sore. Richter looks onward, seeing now as his eyes adjust to the darkness that some of them are missing limbs, exposed spikes where the bone snapped and never healed over, patchworked by skin grafts of seaweed and fish scales. Mutants, they have all become mutants.

“We’re done here,” Richter says. He steps out of the room, feels the density of the thick water at his feet fall and then hit solid steel. Jane and Leon follow, each with damp pants legs and layers of sweat. The smell of rotting fish permeates throughout.

“Take us with you,” Werzig says, “let us propagate your world. You’d get our DNA. Make that cure you and the last group and the group before them have been trying so hard to find.”

“No,” Richter raises his pistol, “I said we’re done here.”

Werzig furrows his brows. The hallway amplifies his voice, which has taken on a grating tone. The jazz music reduces to a whisper. Around the corner, Richter hears movement in the water, the sloshing of soiree-adorned feet wading through fish guts and smashed oyster shells. The ship rocks as if trying to soothe a baby.

“Do you want to be like the last group? We don’t want to keep populating with whatever scraps of biomass we can get. We are a civilized culture, full of rational people. Don’t you understand what you are denying us?”

“I don’t like this,” Jane says.

Werzig steps out of the dark room and closes the heavy door behind him. The others start to appear in the doorways, standing idle, watching. Some have cigarettes balanced in their fingers, emitting sour odors of burnt seaweed. The group of dancers still hold onto each other, but now they stand like sentinels, ramrod straight, inactive department store mannequins.

Werzig roars, “We are existing on scraps!”

A hand stretches out, bony and pale. Her hand unrolls like spider legs, her wrist moving in short, skeletally stiff bursts as her bracelet rattles like Christmas tinsel.

“Take me,” she says, “I want to see the world again. Please.”

“No, you bitch,” another one says, throwing an old magazine into the water where it bloats and then disintegrates. The man has small razor cuts on his cheeks and chin, hiding underneath an attempt at a kept beard. His teeth have yellowed. “It’s Karl. Karl will survive in the new world longer and you will live through Karl.”

“We are one,” the dancers say in unison, turning their heads in Richter’s direction and then into the room across the hall with frantic, sudden movements; a moth suddenly taking off. Their voices are discordant, a mix of soft tenures of pleasure and groans of pain, “if one of us goes, we all go, and we will leave these old, bloated husks of flesh. We are one. We are one. We are one.”

Werzig says, “No. I found them. I deserve to go.”

“We are one,” the dancers chant.

The woman continues, “We propagate via fluids. Let me go. I am the sanest of us, and the most beautiful. This body still has more use.”

The man smoking the cigarette flicks the cylinder in the water, ignoring the feeble sizzle of smoke. “It has been of much use to us, Hilde, for we do not care about the open sores underneath that dress of yours, the seaweed coming in and out of your holes.”

The woman’s lower lip trembles, a flash of clarity. “Leave me alone, Gunther. I’m only human.” She directs her attention to Richter and the others. “Please. I’m only human. This flower is a rapist. Our bodies are prisons.”

“No, I found them,” Werzig says, stepping forward, “I am the most democratic, the cleverest. Hilde, you’d die in a gutter, naked and alone. Gunther, you’d get yourself killed in a pub brawl. And Karl, you will die because you will be outsmarted by the nearest con man. No, you fools, no. Me, Helmut Werzig. I will propagate our virus. I am the most hospitable, most amicable. I will eat with the politicians, rub shoulders with the union men and dock workers.”

“You are arrogant is what you are,” Hilde says.

Werzig says, “That’s the human in you talking about the human in me. We are more than that.”

“We are one!” The dancers yell again.

Hilde advances her jangled hand. She brushes a gnarled talon over Leon’s shoulder. “Please. I’m tired of living. This virus needs a new host, a better host. Let it find someone healthier. Please.” Then she blinks again, losing that trembling part of herself. She arches her back, bites her lower lip. “We can go somewhere dark. I know of a comfy place. Come into union with my body. That will solve everything for everybody.”

“We are one!” The dancer’s discordant voices start to break into laughter. They intertwine once more, flitting in the slogged room.

Richter looks down on his feet as they pedal back out of the hallway and the blank stares of Werzig and his companions. He hears Jane’s steady breathing behind him, the scratching of her backpack swaying like a pendulum. There is an absence of space behind the two of them and Richter looks back to find Leon still in the hallway, this drowned mausoleum, being grabbed by the gnarled fingers of the women and now by the starchy sleeves of the Gunther and his nicotine-stained teeth. His body is pushed in several directions, like a doll desired by multiple children. The dancers prance in the adjacent room, kicking up pebbles of salt water from their feet. Someone turned up the jazz music on the phonogram across the hall.

“Help!” Leon screams, “Richter, Jane!”

He falls backward and Werzig’s companions pounce on him as a trumpet solo reaches a crescendo. They drag him along the rusted hallway and Werzig stares above the tumble at Richter and Jane, his eyes unwavering and voracious. He maintains eye contact as he reopens the door to the mutates so the others can throw Leon in, his screams drowned by smooth jazz. He twists, writhing as fingers dig into his cheeks, reaching under his ribs. He fires his pistol into the crowd. The aggressors stop, and Karl looks down at his stomach, examining the bullet hole.

“Now Karl is leaking,” he says, nonplussed by the wound. No blood escapes his body. This realization causes Leon to squirm and begin weeping, his once hardened exterior reduces to madness, the aggressive encroach of the abyss. Karl picks Leon up by his neck, “If your mind doesn’t shatter, then the flower will take you, and Karl will be freed.”

“You popped him,” Gunter says, “now you’ve damned yourself.”

“No, no!” Leon shouts.

He fires again at Karl, who is only pushed back by the force of the blast, like hitting a sack of wheat. Karl grits his teeth and throws Leon into the vault. Glimpses of the half-consumed and stupid sentinels, their dolphin-like skin full of open wounds and seaweed, turn to glance at Leon, half aware of Leon’s intrusion into their cellar.

“Leon,” Jane shouts, “we have to save him!”

“No,” Richter says, “he’s already dead. Werzig said that shooting them will infect us. I’m taking him up on that threat.”

“We can’t leave him, Richter.”

“We can’t save him either.”

Werzig closes the door. The others brush themselves off, scraping off dried seaweed and clinging clams. Hilde’s jewelry rattles on a listless wrist. They straighten themselves and Werzig points with a gnarled finger.

“If they will not take us, we shall take them,” he says.

The others run after the pair, a flurry of dress shirts and bow ties, hems of glittering skirts. Richter and Jane retreat, moving past the cafeteria, bloated feet snapping at their heels. Richter sprints to the entrance and begins to turn the stiff, heavy wheel. His hands struggle to find purchase on the rusted spokes and latches.

“Open it, Richter! They are coming around the hall!”

“It feels so heavy.”

Richter grunts, feels fire ignite in his muscles. How had Werzig been able to open the door with such little effort? Richter is twice his size and more fit.

Jane rushes to him and holds a spoke. Spots of blood dot their hands as the rust cuts into their palms. They pull at the spokes together, heaving in unison. Richter puts his legs against the jamb and uses the leverage to pull his full body weight. In the corner of their eyes, Werzig and the others appear. Richter swears and with a final grunt falls onto his back, the wheel loosening. Jane opens the door revealing the dark void of the hallway outside like a black hole. A hot, salty gust of dead fish, exposed crabs and rotten seaweed sweeps into the lounge.

Werzig and the others crossed the room. Flecks of Leon’s blood coat Hilde and Karl’s fingertips. Jane cocks her pistol and puts it to her head. Her eyes are red with tears.

“Any step forward and I’ll blow my brains out.”

This stops the pursuers. Werzig steps in front of them. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would,” Jane says, nestling the pistol into her temple, “those flowers can’t invade my mind if my brains are on the floor, and I’d rather be dead than live in that cavern like some cattle.”

Werzig frowns, “Or you could just take us with you to mainland. Simple as that.”

Jane does not respond to him. She tells Richter to get up and he does. He watches Gunter and Hilde begin to twitch and tap their feet. Their nostrils start to flare. Hilde puts jangled wrists to her head and begins massaging her scalp.

She says, “Close the door, please. I can feel them outside, taste what they taste. Please. Cut off the link.”

Richter looks to the void. He remembers Werzig suggesting that the likes of Mr. Jiminy and the other people whose minds became shattered would begin to infect them, too. The gaping maw of salt and floating eyeballs is a noxious aura of protection. Slowly, cautiously, Richter and Jane step backwards into the dark hall, back into the bowels of the S.S. Lotus. Werzig appears on the threshold, lips trembling and eyes bulging. He descends into madness before their eyes. Wordlessly, Werzig shuts shut the door behind them, complaining about scraps, and leaves them in darkness. Once the door is fastened, a discordant series of shrieks and wails erupt; sounds of anger and sadness, of hunger. It is monstrous, beastly, full of gargling and like nails against the chalkboard. It makes Richter’s hair stand on end.

“Leon…” Jane said, fishing out her flashlight.

“He’s gone, Jane. Either he’s going to be one of them, or…” he brings out his flashlight, scans the empty hallway with its ankle-deep water and crust of barnacles, “or one of them. He was gone the second they grabbed him.”

They navigate through the darkness, their paths carved by the circular scope of the flashlights, side by side. Their ankles brush against strands of seaweed and half-eaten crabs dissected by withered, scabby hands. Pink coagulates of shredded fish bob along masts of barnacles. Each turn brings them to another corner, each a similar sight. The S.S. Lotus is a dreadnought, but no larger than a typical supply ship. These virulent trojan horses were built to mimic supply ships for this reason. Yet somehow, it seems labyrinthine on the inside, a complex network of twists and turns existing beyond all logic of dimension. Occasionally the ship will bob from a passing wave or would snap with random pinging of metal against metal.

“Here,” Richter says, “I think it’s here.”

Jane nods and they make the turn, swinging their cones of light with them like a lame limb. There, in the scope, stands Mr. Jiminy. A shattered mind, now holding a flailing fish in both hands and biting down on its shimmering scales, flakes and white guts popping from the side of his mouth. His milky eyes stare at them but remain as absent as before, a tongue lopping out from his lower lip.

“Flower,” he says.

White figures, all willowy and in torn cocktail suits, appear in the cones of light behind Mr. Jiminy. They tilt their bald skeletal heads and dropped whatever there are trying to eat. Blocks of barnacles, oyster shells, and twitching crabs fall at their ankles. They stand frozen in the light, blinking stupidly, tendrils of drool lazily dropping from their chins.

“Oh no,” Jane says.

At once Mr. Jiminy and the others start after them with long, stilted legs. The sound of breaking water trails in front of them. Richter and Jane break into a run, turning randomly, each trying to keep the light in front of them and stay with one another. Gargled voices echo metallically in the distance, piercing through the dark. Occasional laughter and giggles sound like broken keys on a piano. They continue to run, splashing through the ichor, crushing whatever runoff settled underneath the ankle-deep water. Wraiths appear in their cones of light, sometimes running at them in a white, stinking flash, sometimes in pursuit down another hall. It appears that their shattered minds cannot comprehend directions, having wandered so aimlessly around these subterranean catacombs for many years. It is the illumination which attracts them. Richter tells Jane to shut off her flashlight.

Now they wade through the darkness, gingerly turning corners once giggles and laughter subside down the hall. One of them occupies the same hall as Richter and Jane. The stink of rotting fish, while unpleasant, is a good indicator of their coming, and one of the wraiths comes so close that the shoulder of his bloated jacket grazes upon Jane’s nose. Richter puts a calloused hand over her mouth to stop her from screaming. Once the wraith passes, they continue their escape, eventually making their way to the familiar corner leading to the stairs. The blue-white glow of Leon’s markings looks like the golden rays of Heaven.

“Go,” Richter whispers.

They reach the foot of the stairs. The door to the middle level of the hip is ajar, having been thrown open in haste after they discovered the vault empty. Richter follows up the rear, watching Jane ascend the steps two at a time. Once he makes sure that Jane was well up the steps, he lifts his legs from the water and feels rubbery hands wrap around his neck.

“Flower.” A voice whispers into his ear. It is gargled, hardly a language.

Richter feels like one of the fishes or crabs in Mr. Jiminy’s grasp. With arms much stronger than the branch-like limbs he possesses, Mr. Jiminy slams Richter into the adjacent walls. Rushes of blood fall from his brow, and saltwater stings the open wound. He feels his throat closing, and Richter fires the gun at Mr. Jiminy, who only stumbles from the impact, unaware of the gunshot.. His gnarled hands are cragged, rubbery, and smell like dead fish. He giggles like a child amused by toy blocks. Jane calls after him.

“No!” Richter says, trying to pry Mr. Jiminy’s hands from his throat and face, “Get out of here!”

Jane stands on the stairs for a second. She locks eyes with Richter and understands. She watches Richter claw at the bottom of the stairs for a second longer, watches his face slam into the metal steps, his open mouth gulping the stale, necrotic salt water, and ascends the rest of the way. Richter fights for purchase, his body scraping against smashed oyster shells and barnacles. He aims his gun, fires two more times into Mr. Jiminy’s torso. Mr. Jiminy recoils, paws at Richter’s throat, and tears out a part of his carotid artery, tossing it aside like a slug. Richter gasps in a final pulse of energy and aims the pistol at Mr. Jiminy’s temple, firing. A flash of light, the smell of gun smoke dominates the salty, rancid air. Mr. Jiminy falls to his side. Richter leans on the steps, a gorge of blood rising into his throat, the sticky warmth of it trailing down his chest. With one hand on the bottom step and another resting on Mr. Jiminy’s dead body, he leans his head on a concave of barnacles crusted upon the wall.

He pictures himself looking at the ship from a bird’s eye view. Deep within the bowels of the S.S. Lotus Leon lay trapped like cattle, a food source for the strange commune of Helmut Werzig and his associates, or whatever they have turned into. He sits now at the bottom of the stairs, drowning not in these damned waterlogged hallways but in his own blood, never to see the shore again. And Jane, by the grace of whatever God may or may not exist, frantically untying their boat and starting the engine with bloodied, shaking fingers, the madness of the S.S. Lotus falling away in her wake.

Lea herself didn’t have a mobile phone on her as she hardly used it. This was because she preferred to have different equipment for different purposes. To take photos, she used a camera. To find a new place, she consulted first a traditional map and then she drew her own small map which she held in her hand when looking for her destination. Most importantly, however, Lea simply did not like the look and touch of smartphones. For her, a smartphone was like a cross between a grenade and a rodent, waiting for the right moment to blow one’s hand or bite one’s ear, therefore she normally left it at home and only took it when travelling abroad. Even then, she put it at the bottom of her suitcase, where it quietly run out of battery. Lea’s smartphonophobia didn’t go unnoticed. People asked her how she managed to survive being so ‘disconnected’. When she explained, they gave her funny looks or with ironic smiles wished her good luck in moving against the tide.

A couple of weeks after the episode in the restaurant Lea noticed that most people’s smartphones emitted an orange light and that when looked at from a specific angle, the ears and hands of some of the smartphone users were also glowing with orange light, albeit much weaker than that which the phones emitted. She didn’t share this observation with anybody, not to reinforce her reputation as an eccentric, but at home she took the smartphone away from Alex, her son, replacing it with an old model of a mobile phone and asked him not to use it, unless absolutely necessary. Since then she spent much time teaching Alex the skills one needed when one didn’t have a phone, such as using maps and playing music from vinyl records and CDs. To make him keener, she told him that this was what she and her father used to do when they were young, long before Alex was born.

Alex was initially dismissive of this ‘back to the old days’ exercise but later started to enjoy the time spent on the old devices or without any electronic equipment whatsoever, cycling with Lea to the neighbouring villages and having lunch in the old-style cafés. It was on such trips that Alex also discovered the orange light originating from the bodies of some guests. Unlike Lea, for him the light had a different intensity and shape; on some occasions Alex saw a glow, on others, sharp rays piercing the air and reaching as far as the ceiling.

“The orange monsters try to find the best way to take over people’s bodies and launch an attack,” he said to Lea, pointing out to her a particularly strong orange ray, which for her, however, looked like a fragment of a blurred rainbow.

“Shh, don’t say that to anybody,” said his mother. “People will take us for nutters.”

“But we’re not,” protested Alex.

“I know, but as long as the rest of the world doesn’t see the world the way we do, our perceptions are not valid.”

On one visit to the café some twenty miles from home, Lea noticed that light also emanated from Alex and it was green. When by chance he lifted his hand, sharp green rays crossed in the air with one man’s orange rays. The man must have got a strong headache as a result as he buried his head in his hands and went to the waitress asking for Aspirin. For the duration of their stay, the guests’ smartphones stopped working. In consequence, some people left before they finished their meals and one went to the manager accusing her of creating ‘white space’ to force the customers to eat more. Lea and Alex found this accusation rather funny, but they kept quiet and left when there were still several customers, so they couldn’t be identified as the culprits. After that, they tried to avoid this café. Luckily it coincided with a beginning of a period of short days and heavy rain, followed by an unusually severe winter, which put Lea and Alex off from cycling. They were spending most of their weekends at home, reading books, listening to music and playing board games. They also hugged a lot and touched each other’s hands. Although it was enjoyable by itself and the two were affectionate all of Alex’s life, they felt that now there was more to it than cuddling, as every time their bodies touched, a refreshing coolness moved between them and they became more energetic. Without saying a word, they knew when it was happening and giggled when it did so.

When winter passed, many of the children in Alex’s school got ear infections. It was attributed to a nasty virus which arrived in the North of England, together with the bad weather. Its peculiarity consisted of attacking only one ear, the right in the case of right-handed children, and the left in the case of the left-handed ones. It caused a burning pain and black discharge, which looked like ash mixed with saliva. The doctors didn’t know what to do apart from giving the children antibiotics and vitamins because they were not familiar with such an ailment. Alex was the only child in his year who didn’t get the illness. He told his form tutor that this was most likely because he stopped using a mobile phone, but she laughed it off, saying that it was proved beyond doubt that smartphones were completely safe and the school was not a place to spread conspiracy theories. But during the same meeting, she praised Alex for making progress in practically all of his subjects. In less than a year he moved from being an average pupil to the top of his class. Alex believed that this was not because he had gotten much better, but because the rest of his class had gotten worse, but he didn’t say it as he didn’t want to offend anybody.

Eventually, the ear infections cleared up but the children emerged from the illness weaker. Most lost hearing in one ear and after some time, in the other, as well as their appetite and energy. A year after the mysterious illness only about a dozen kids in Alex’s school were still able to hear and the school had to adapt to teaching all children as if they were deaf. The same pattern could be observed across the whole region; children got ear infections which debilitated them. Lea was surprised that the media kept quiet about this epidemic; the only sign that it was acknowledged was indirect; the health section of the BBC website heralded the lowering rates of child obesity in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the area’s drive to learn sign language, which was presented as a sign of the growing inclusivity of the British society, particularly the North.

Alex didn’t mind using sign language at school, but this made him eager to return home, where he could chat with his mother in his usual noisy way, with talking being mixed with laughing. In fact, every day he came home anxious that Lea might also lose her voice because deafness and muteness had become more common also among the adult population. Quietly and gradually, sign language became the dominant language not only at schools but also in the offices of all sorts of businesses and even the parliament. Rather than fighting to translate sound language into sign language, now those who weren’t deaf demanded that the sound language was preserved in national institutions, but their plight was usually dismissed as bigotry.

The spread of deafness and muteness affected the way films and music were produced and consumed. There was a massive return to silent cinema. New films were made without sound; old films were subtitled or discarded if it was deemed unprofitable to subtitle them. The makers and distributors of these films argued that only now had cinema fulfilled its promise of becoming a universal language – the century of sound cinema was a step back on the road to achieving this goal. There was also a return to black and white films, as people were increasingly insensitive to colour, but here the resistance was stronger, especially from the arthouse directors’ lobby, who didn’t want to lose their distinction from those producing commercial films. In music, the louder instruments got prevalence over the quieter ones. Drums and bass guitars dominated the stage, rendering acoustic guitars, pianos and flutes redundant. Despite such adjustments, there was simply less demand for music, and musicians filled the queues for unemployment benefits. Many became homeless. One could see them begging on the streets of Marston, propped by their silent guitars, to indicate that they were not ordinary junkies or weaklings kicked out from their houses by their girlfriends, but a nobler kind, like the victims of tsunamis or political persecution. The problem was that the streets were now full of such destitute ex-professionals, surrounding themselves with their now obsolete instruments and almost nobody paid any attention to them. Everybody in Lea’s work agreed that it was only a matter of time before the university folk joined them, but for some strange reason, this moment kept being postponed.

Lea, who was both charitable and a music lover, was spending a large part of her salary handing money to the begging musicians. Eventually, she offered one such musician, a young man named Daniel with a sunny face and large dark eyes, who turned out to be half-Cuban and half-Hungarian, a room in their house. She thought, perhaps irrationally, that as Daniel knew three languages, he might keep his voice longer than most people.

Daniel was happy to move in. He admired Lea’s collection of Spanish books and conversed with her in this language. Sometimes Alex joined in, as the silence surrounding him outside home made him eager to learn foreign languages – something which he didn’t want to do previously. Daniel also played board games with Lea and Alex and started to teach Alex how to play guitar and drums, even though previously music was Alex’s least favourite subject at school, till it was quietly abolished due to the spread of deafness. For Alex’s thirteenth birthday Lea bought her son not one, but two guitars and a drum kit, as they were now sold for pennies. Daniel also turned out to be very good at repairing things in the house and even making furniture. Like Alex, he was also chatty and in a short time, Alex and Daniel became best friends. Every day Alex was checking if Daniel wasn’t producing any orange light and when he contracted it (usually after a trip to a shop or a local diner), Alex extinguished it through the touch of his ‘green hands’. He confessed to Lea that he was doing it also at school, and after several of his ‘healing sessions’ kids were regaining some of their hearing and voice. Lea asked if the teachers knew about his power, but he said no – he was doing it discreetly, not out of fear of teachers, but in order not to be pestered by the whole school.

The growing deafness slowed communication as everything now had to be written down or conveyed by gestures. People also started to make more mistakes in their writing than they used to. At Lea’s university, the lecturers got special training to learn what the students intended to say when they wrote gibberish and mark their work according to the merit of their intention. However, many of those who were meant to teach them also experienced illiteracy of sorts and were unable to decipher either the text or its intentions. Consequently, nobody now wanted to show colleagues how they marked their students’ work in order not to be accused of incompetence. The management recognised the problem as it was itself also plagued with it. The response was limiting direct communication to the bare minimum. In order to send an e-mail to an external institution, one had to receive numerous permissions and even writing to colleagues required vetting by the head of department and somebody from HR. Lea began to wonder whether other employers adopted the same procedures, but it was impossible to find out because employers everywhere were secretive about their practices.

As weeks and months passed, Lea’s workplace became quieter, literally and metaphorically, as the people lost the will to write or gesture, as well as their voice. In offices, she frequently saw employees scrolling a mouse on a blank computer screen with a vacant expression or moving their finger on the lower parts of their smartphone as if they were reading the Braille alphabet. They even didn’t do it to pretend that they were working, as they didn’t change their behaviour when their superiors came in. There was much talking about the change – the approaching change was the explanation and excuse for this stupor because there was no point in investing one’s energy in the present, if the present was meant to be swept away any minute from now.

Eventually, the change was about to happen: the company Pineapple decided to introduce to the market a new smartphone, the ‘wordless’. The idea behind it was that people would send messages using a phone which would absorb the person’s thoughts, edit them and pass them to their addressee. This soon-to-be universal telepathy was meant to be the fastest, cheapest and most effective way of communication ever invented. To transfer their thoughts properly, however, people would have to focus on what they wanted to say or otherwise, the wrong messages would be delivered or they would be unreadable or get stuck in the thoughts-processing centres. One could imagine how dangerous such a situation would be, if, for example, political and industrial secrets were passed to enemies. A wrong use would also lead to unnecessary use of electricity and e-waste. In short, there were meant to be great advantages to learning how to use the Pineapple phone well and disadvantages in resisting this great invention. Pineapple admitted that the new phone was a bit bulky, but all great inventions started like that. In due course, it would become smaller and more convenient to use.

Lea’s university signed an agreement with Pineapple to launch there a pilot project to assess the effectiveness of the new phone before the device was to be used commercially; the Training Unit was given the task of testing the new technology on its employees. The skill needed to master it was labelled the ‘channelled mode of thinking’ and it consisted of thinking one thought at a time and making sure this thought was directed to the right address: the student, the colleague, the manager or somebody external. Thoughts had to move quickly rather than occupy one’s mind endlessly and be work-centred rather than private or random, as this is what working should be about – being at one’s office not only in one’s body but also in one’s mind. To participate in this test, the staff was to wear the phone during their working hours. It looked like a helmet, filled with thin cords which attached themselves to the nerves like tentacles of the octopus, except that an octopus had only eight tentacles while this helmet had hundreds. The tentacles were meant to collect the thoughts and send them to the processing centres which would edit them before passing them further, as well as prepare the statistics for the day, listing how many messages were prepared correctly, how many went adrift, how many stay in one place and the overall quality of intellectual work performed by a given person. Those who had a low ratio of correct messages were to receive extra support either from motivational speakers or yoga instructors. The former were to help the staff think fast and straightforward; the latter to assist them in concentrating on useful thoughts and to clear their heads from ‘dust’. People gossiped that the best way to pass this test, which presumably would determine one’s continuous employment or lack thereof was to clear one’s mind with a line of cocaine in the morning. The management must have found out about it as the next day the campus was plastered with posters about the dangers of drugs and warnings that being caught on using them equalled instantaneous dismissal.

“Can I opt-out from this trial?” Lea asked a woman who was leading one of the pre-testing sessions.

“Why do you want to do that?” asked the woman.

“I would like to keep my thoughts private,” said Lea.

“Honest people have nothing to hide,” said the woman.

“They might want to hide this very fact, in order to not be taken advantage of,” said Lea.

“This exercise is not about curtailing people’s privacy or censoring their thoughts, but about working more efficiently and improving communication. This is how humanity develops – by changing the modes of communication. Once one mode ceases being efficient, another needs to be introduced. We are now on the threshold of the communication revolution, but to make it happen, we need to show commitment.”

“Can you explain to me why the old mode of communication stopped being efficient? Why people can’t speak or write correctly anymore?” asked Lea.

“This is an evolutionary thing. Certain organs regress or disappear when they stop being useful, like the tails on monkeys when they developed into humans. Of course, there are always “dinosaurs”, who keep their extra teeth or useless tails, even groom them as if they were a sign of their superiority. But they delude themselves by thinking that they matter; they are irrelevant or even obstructive. It is in these organs where toxins accumulate.”

Lea wasn’t convinced by this argument, which sounded memorised and recited, so there was no point to discuss it any further, especially as her interlocutor produced an above-average amount of orange light, which made Lea almost dizzy.

“Returning to your question, I will have to talk to my boss. I will let you know as soon as I find out,” said the woman.

The following week Lea learnt that going through the training was not compulsory, but was essential for keeping her professorial job and salary. The alternative was to get re-deployed, either to the university catering services or to estate management, moving furniture and other stuff along with the robots. She decided to go to catering as she couldn’t do heavy lifting. She was sad to tell Alex, as he was always proud that his mother was a professor, but it turned out that he wasn’t too concerned. He said that they would manage even on her reduced wages, as they were used to modest living and thanks to working in the kitchen Lea was allowed to bring uneaten food back home. In fact, there was so much waste food these days, that the leftovers were enough for all three of them. The government boasted that the epidemic of obesity was finally averted, but in Lea’s view, it was less to do with the policies of public health or self-restraint and more with the general lethargy enveloping the population.

Some of her new co-workers, like Lea, found themselves in catering because of their refusal to wear the gear provided by Pineapple. They made their choices for various reasons. A couple of union activists objected because they were politically minded and didn’t want their thoughts being censored; two lecturers from psychology because they were prone to migraines and dizziness and believed that the ‘helmet’ would trigger their illnesses. There was also a woman from the fashion department who refused this gear because she specialised in designing hats and regarded the headgear as hideous and a threat to her job. They were all called the ‘Left Behind’. It was meant to be a term of abuse, but their recipients embraced it. ‘We, the Left Behind must stick together,’ they said and they greeted each other by putting their hands on their heads as if to show that nothing, literally and figuratively, was exerting pressure on their brains – they were their own masters. Lea looked at this budding symbolism with amusement, yet she succumbed to it because she didn’t want to be left behind even by the Left Behind. She wanted to belong somewhere, not so much for her own sake, as for Alex’s.

Lea quite liked her new work, not least because half of the people who were working in catering weren’t deaf and even when they were making wraps and sandwiches, they engaged in conversation. They also didn’t mind speaking their minds. But even the most outspoken complained that ‘speaking one’s mind’ didn’t mean what it used to, because society had lost the ability to judge others’ outspokenness. The language of most people had become reduced to the basics and such layers of linguistic expression as irony went unnoticed by its recipients.

One day after work Lea found in her pigeonhole a piece of paper inviting her to a meeting at the professor of neurosurgery’s house, Eric, who’d been demoted to the campus’ assistant gardener. He lived in a part of Marston that Lea had never visited before. There were about ten people when Lea arrived, mostly university folk, but there was also a woman who used to work at the council and got fired when she demanded that a quarter of the city become an internet-free area.

They started the meeting by introducing themselves and then Eric said: “We’re meeting here because we are concerned about the future: our own future and that of our children and grandchildren. We are called the Left Behind, but I believe that it is the rest of the world which is moving backwards, while we, at least, managed to stand still.”

“Why do you think so?” asked somebody.

“The people who surround us are gradually losing their senses. It started with hearing, but now it is also sight, smell, taste and touch. And with the loss of the senses, comes the loss of intellectual power, as it is the use of the senses which allows us to develop intellect, as John Locke observed as early as the seventeenth century. And when both the senses and intellect are impaired, the will to live also diminishes,” said Eric.

“We are told that the loss of the senses has to do with the development of intellect. The more intelligent people are, the less they need their senses. Pure intellect is meant to compensate for these losses,” said a woman from psychology.

 “I think this theory is false. Intellect is not autonomous – it cannot develop in the void,” said Eric.

“If this is the case, why does all of this happen?” asked Lea.

“I’m not sure, but I believe that this has to do with the consequences of long-term exposure to substances used in computers and even more so, smartphones,” said Eric.

“What substances?” asked somebody whom Lea had never met before.

“I don’t know,” said Eric. “I am or rather I was a neurosurgeon, not a chemist, but I think it is not a single element, such as mercury, whose effect on the body is fairly well-known, but their combination. And because as many as 62 different types of metals go into an average smartphone, it is very difficult to say which combination is most dangerous. It might be copper and neodymium, gold and terbium, zinc and dysprosium or all of them. But even before this epidemic, I discovered that some smartphones emit an orange glow which has the power to penetrate one’s body, like sunlight penetrating the bodies of people who spend too much time sunbathing. Once it has moved under the skin, it slowly destroys what is there, like the mysterious virus we heard about last year. Has anybody noticed the orange glow?”

Lea, of course, knew it very well, as well as the green glow, but she didn’t want to bring it up, at least not until the others did.

There was only one person who saw it, a guy from criminology who specialised in explosives. Correctly, he also noticed that the light took two forms: rays and an amorphous glow.

“Rays are for shooting, glow is for strangling,” he said in an impassive voice.

“Why can’t the rest of us see it?”, asked a man with very thick glasses, which made Lea giggle silently.

 “It’s possible that together with getting weaker, we lose the power to notice what happens to us. Ignorance is a means of putting up with loss”, said Eric.

 “So we are doomed?” asked the woman from the fashion department.

“I hope not. There were plagues in the past which decimated communities, but in the end, these communities managed to survive. Sometimes the epidemic simply went away; on other occasions, a cure was invented, like antibiotics. Here it seems to me that the first stage to halt the plague should be to give up smartphones. Instead, what we see is Pineapple introducing a more sophisticated version, which uses all these rare metals, only in larger quantities and produces more orange light, which goes straight to people’s brains.”

“Why do they do it? Do they want to destroy us?” asked the ex-council employee.

“We cannot exclude that possibility, but I think it has more to do with a need to conceal the old flaws. Once everybody is using the new version of the smartphone, nobody will ask what was wrong with the old version. This is how technology develops. Who these days, apart from historians, ponders on the disadvantages of using a jenny or printing machines? But I think we need to resist the change because the new smartphone is more dangerous than anything previously invented. It is not like a new jenny, but a new guillotine.”

“Why is this scheme being piloted in England, rather than in the States, where the company has its headquarters or in China where most of the smartphones are produced?” asked a man who used to work in sociology.

“Good question,” said Eric, “In fact, the pilot schemes are running in these countries as well. England, however, was chosen, because here the gap between what the people think and say publicly was deemed the greatest and this is especially the case in Marston. The assumption is that if the English people can be trained to “say” what they “think”, everybody can. But this is exactly the reason why we shouldn’t allow this to happen.”

“What should we do?”

“First, we should resist the experiment, not allow the orange light to penetrate our bodies and those of our kids. We also need to have our eyes open to people who might have developed antibodies, anti-rays. It is them who will show us a way out of this apocalypse.”

“How to recognise them?”

“I’m not sure yet, but I know that there are already people working on constructing equipment which would capture the orange radiation. The hope is that it will be able also to identify benign radiation. Most likely its carriers, our saviours, will be young and for some reason have been sheltered from the orange light until they were able to fight it. We need to have them on our side and extract their secret.”

“Surely we cannot do it without their consent and that of their parents,” said Lea.

“Why shouldn’t they consent when the saving of humanity is at stake?” asked Eric rhetorically.

“Maybe they want to be left in peace. Maybe their parents want them to be left in peace,” continued Lea, thinking that already she’d said too much.

“This would be very selfish of them,” said Eric.

On the way back Eric and his friend gave everybody a bunch of leaflets to distribute. Fittingly, they were printed on the old, yellowish paper which practically stopped being used some years previously and was quietly rotting in the rooms housing defunct equipment, such as photocopiers and scanners.

Its author, on behalf of the ‘Resistance’ asked that people stop using the helmets and ‘regain their voice’. Lea threw them in a bin on the way to the railway station, which took her almost an hour to get to. She was thinking how Marston had changed since she started working there twenty-six years previously. On the winter day of her job interview, she’d thought how she’d never seen as nice a place as Marston. All the shops were beautifully decorated: Debenhams, BHS, Marks and Spencer and dozens of independent shops. And over the next fifteen years or so all of them had gone. Only food shops remained but they were also decimated. Against the background of their disappearance, restaurants, pubs, hairdressers and beauty salons became more prominent and it stayed this way for a while until a new app helped people cut their own hair and they stopped going to restaurants because of the crowds of homeless people living in abandoned shops nearby.

Back at home, Lea asked Alex and Daniel whether they attracted any unusual attention at school. They didn’t.

“Okay, but don’t agree to wear a helmet or give blood or saliva or anything,” she said.

Eric’s predictions turned out right. Although still few people were able to see the orange light, in the next year belief in its existence became almost universal. This could be gauged by the ferocity with which the government and the established media rejected its existence as a conspiracy. ‘There is no orange light,’ was a message which appeared on the screens of computers and mobile phones, as well as on posters and billboards. Inevitably, as soon as such posters were put up, people got rid of the ‘no’. Like in the past tattoo parlours became popular, now the cities were filled with shops selling meters measuring one’s ‘orange radiation’, as well as measuring it on their premises. They were all illegal, but nobody cared – after many years of disappearing professions it was one which offset, albeit in a small measure, the losses of industry and trade. Soon the orange light meter sellers started to offer pills and tonics to reduce the radiation. Again, the authorities warned against their ineffectiveness and toxicity, but this was seen widely as proof that they were actually working. However, people were waiting for the true breakthrough – something which would allow them, not only to slow the penetration of orange light into their bodies, but regenerate them.

One day Alex came to Lea’s work to fetch her to see Daniel’s gig. Paradoxically, Daniel started to get more work recently, not because people were regaining their hearing but because those who were still able to hear were looking for spaces where they could meet like-minded or rather like-sensed people. During the concerts people would often throw their arms forward. This was to show that no orange light emanated from their hands: there were no traitors among them. Lea was reluctant to do so, as she didn’t like to participate in public displays of emotions. But, as the people around her looked at her, she did so and so did Alex. It was then that everybody noticed that they both produced more green light than the rest of the people in the room put together. Especially Alex – the rays from his hands managed to reach the furthest corners of the hall, changing the gloomy room into something like an old-style disco.

After the concert, Lea and Alex were surrounded by the rest of the audience. The people asked Alex to touch them – their ears, the top of their heads, their mouths. Alex did as he was asked, and some people put money into his pocket as he was doing it. But that wasn’t the end of it. He was asked to meet their relatives and friends. One woman said that she could arrange a large-scale ‘healing session’ in an old church.

Lea decided to intervene. She jumped in front of her son, saying. “Please, leave him alone. He’s just a boy and we don’t need your money.”

Lea took the notes out of Alex’s pockets and tried to give them back, but nobody accepted them.

“Keep them, keep them,” they were shouting.

They returned home by taxi. As they were leaving, people stood by the wayside, waving to them. It appeared that there were more of them now than there were at the concert.

Back at home, Lea said to Alex: “We cannot stay in this city. If more people learn about your ability to produce green light, we will be besieged. Somebody might want to kill you to extract the light from your body. We have to escape.”

“Mum, we cannot run away. These are my people. If I don’t save them, they will perish.”

Daniel joined in, adding, “Alex is right. We have to stay here,” and he put his arms around Lea and Alex and Alex embraced Daniel and Lea. Lea also, somewhat against her will, stretched her arms out and put them around Daniel and Alex, so that they created a circle. Then Lea noticed that there was a second circle surrounding them, made of green light. It didn’t stay still but moved as in a joyful dance.

Church tied a bandana over his mouth and nose and dumped the man’s bedpan into the tub of the hotel bathroom. The pan’s ecosystem had rubbed the porcelain raw and sent scaly growths climbing the lip of the tub, turning the curtains moth-brown.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Church told the Marriott man. “Chapter seven tonight.” He ruffled the pages of a tattered Dickens paperback, the cover peeled off.

The man’s eyes fluttered under their lids.

Church smiled.

He scrubbed the Marriott man’s dinner plate downstairs in what was once the restaurant kitchen. The Dastard Palms Hotel had a full pantry, even a year after the world had blacked out, enough yet for four months. Six, if the three of them stretched.

“How is he?” Marsh fished a warm beer from the fridge that hadn’t worked since February. Back then, she would have thrown on a T-shirt before entering the same room as him, but now she sweated through nothing but her workout tank and shorts, about to hit the shower.

“He’s conscious, I think. We need to move him into a new room soon. It’s spreading to the carpet.” Church dried the dinner plate and placed it in a cabinet labeled DAVY JONES in black Sharpie. He waited for Marsh to comment, but she never did. “I might need your help.”

Marsh pretended not to hear.

“Peloton says I’ve biked four hundred twenty-two miles.” She loosened and redid her wet ponytail. “I’d be all the way to South Carolina by now.”

“What’s in South Carolina?”

“Let’s say I was.”

Church nodded.

“That’d be at least one reason to visit, then.” He moved past Marsh and fetched a water bottle. Neither of them trusted the tap. “Mr. Marriott might like the Carolinas. It can’t beat Disney World, but it’s not like the rides are working.”

“Let’s say it’s only us. Let’s say Mr. Marriott stays here.”

Church redonned his bandana mask and thumbed his page in the Dickens paperback. He knew Marsh’s routine by now, and she knew his. Both knew what the other wanted to hear.

“Let’s say I’ll think about it.”

Church kept the poolside patio lights on every night, even when he wasn’t outside straddling a sun lounger and listening to strays rummage garbage in the darkness. The Milky Way spilled overhead in a starry earth-halo now that light pollution was nil, the hollow expanse of which reminded Church just how small he was. The abandoned Hyatt and Four Seasons and other superstructures of Resort District Florida punctured the skyline like looted Egyptian tombs from a bygone glory.

A radio coughed white noise beside his lounger, the dial slippery from use. He didn’t know what he hoped to hear through the static. There was nothing out there. The world was dead and he refused to bury it. The sole exception was some guy hunkered south of town playing Billy Joel over the air, but that was the only blip amid the blackout. Most nights Church found ole Billy eerier than the static.

Marsh’s Peloton whirred from her second-floor room. Through the balcony window, she was pounding pedals and racking up miles she couldn’t cash in. Even if it wasn’t for the extra juice she was drip-feeding into their tiny backup generator, Church had no doubt she would be up there pedaling anyway. She had arrived eight months ago, shortly after the world had stopped broadcasting and even the looters had begun migrating north. She had run marathons and iron mans before. Had run in the Olympics, too.

“Always running,” Church said to no one.

Church wasn’t a runner. He was a drifter. Too young to call himself a snowbird, but that’s what he was. Ever since Rachel died, before the world had gone dark and its people unraveled, he had made his way south, riding his thumb partway, buses in the other parts, nodding off at motels far worse than the Palms. Rachel had wanted to retire in Florida. A faraway plan meant for the faraway future, but after months at her bedside across five hospitals and four experimental treatments and more doctors than he could keep straight, the future had turned a sour, hollow color, and Church knew nowhere better to spend it.

In the early days, he and Marsh had made supply runs once or twice a week, gleaning whatever the looters had overlooked. The department stores and retail giants were out of the question. The fancy hotels and gated resorts fared worse; looters had sucked the ground-level rooms and pantries dry, stripped them clean to bone and plaster, but most folks hadn’t bothered hauling mattresses and mini-fridges all the way from the rooftop suites.

That’s where Church and Marsh found the expensive booze. Many a morning they would wake to find themselves sprawled in their underwear in a room they could never have afforded in the previous life, content not to ask each other if anything had happened the night prior. Because nothing ever happened.

Nothing until the Marriott man.

They had discovered him curled beetle-like and bleeding in the shower room of the Marriott northside of Disney, naked save for a towel. Marsh still had sympathy then.

Church had returned periodically those first few weeks, curious if anyone would come looking for Mr. Marriott. A wife. A son. A dog even. Someone to claim him. But no one came, and Church stopped expecting them.

Church didn’t expect much of anything now, but that all things would persist, that Mr. Marriott would take his time recovering, that the man would continue in stasis, tethered to this life by ambiguous, precarious strings. Church had expected Marsh always to be around to keep him sane, the inevitability of otherwise—of South Carolina—never once blipping onto his radar. He wouldn’t leave a dying man behind, but wouldn’t was a far cry from shouldn’t.

It was providence, them finding each other. The Marriott man wouldn’t find greater care from anyone else. It gave a flavor of meaning to it all, more than the poolside vigils and the drinking and the not-dying. It had given meaning to both Church and Marsh, or so Church had assumed.

He threw his beer into the pool and watched the water ripple. The bottle bobbed stubbornly, refusing to sink. When Billy Joel melted into static, Church dialed the radio off and thought about jumping in. Thought about bobbing. About sinking.

A crash and a sputter of barks echoed from far away, scattering all thought, but Church didn’t stir. Nothing ever disturbed the Dastard Palms. Strays and crocs didn’t sneak in anymore to dip in the pool, which was more bog than chlorine these days, though on occasion black fins flippered along the swampy surface, the same dark mysteries that swam in the Marriott man’s bedpan.

“It might be infected, but it’s not Davy Jones,” Church said.

“Would you lie if it was?”

Church didn’t answer.

Marsh sat on the kitchen counter with her back to Church and her shirt pulled over her shoulder blade. Her Cthulhu tattoo snarled at him while he inspected the rough patch of discolored skin bridging her bony spine.

“It’s not Davy Jones,” he repeated.

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll borrow some of your poultice.”

The poultice had done little for Mr. Marriott, but Church didn’t argue.

“Do you think Davy Jones is it? This is what ended the world?” Marsh rolled her shirt down and pivoted on the counter.

“Has it ended? We’re still here.”

“Barely.”

Church shrugged.

“I don’t think it’s contagious, so no.” He bared his arms and wrists. “I would have sprouted by now if it was.”

Marsh swung her legs back and forth, pedaling air.

“He’s not getting better, you know,” Marsh said. “One day you’ll go up and find a fish in his bed, not a man.”

Church folded his arms and gave her an indulgent, academic nod.

“I used to change his sheets,” she said. “His body… There are appendages I couldn’t explain.”

If the Marriott man was mutating into some unholy crustacean, would Church wheel him to the coast one day to let him scuttle out to sea to be with his own kind? Church supposed he would. He couldn’t go on reading Dickens novels to a dead fish night after night, or maybe he would, if only to foster the illusion that nothing had changed. But the Marriott man was changing. The unspoken horror was what neither of them dared speculate; what if this wasn’t a man turning into an unthinkable, but something unthinkable turning into a man?

“You’re not paying some sort of penance by keeping him. He’s not Rachel. Even if he was—” Marsh reached out to take his hand, then must have thought better of it. “Sometimes it’s okay to accept what’s happening to a person.”

“You never knew Rachel.”

“No, but you did.” Marsh nudged him with her foot. “I wouldn’t think differently of you. If we left him, I mean.”

“You must think pretty low of me now, then.” Church grabbed her an unsolicited beer from the fridge. One for himself as well. Neither took a sip.

“You’ve done more than most men would, and not just for him.” She patted the countertop beside her, but Church didn’t take the invitation.

“I’m gonna run a bath for you,” he said. “You should soak that rough patch.”

Marsh was watching him, still pedaling, when Church turned away.

Church carried the Tupperware and blanket down to the shore, close enough to cool their toes in the sand but not close enough to soak their shorts. Marsh passed the gasoline jug between her hands, trotting ahead of him, humming a tune he never could name.

He set the picnic while Marsh scrounged their old firewood stash, higher up along the beach. Both remembered where. They used to motorbike to the ocean every week to watch the sun drown, summon a fire, drink a little, dance a lot, and invent backstories for the boats and debris that washed ashore. 

They didn’t talk about the Marriott man. They ate stale granola bars and rice and waved to the buoys blinking lonely blinks out at sea. A cruise ship lumbered by at a great distance more than once, stalking the shore, as dark and uninviting as water, ambiguously manned. They mooned over ships, not in the sense they wanted rescue, but out of curiosity; could it be that people lived on them, after all this time, that they had known better than to dock?

“You’d get claustrophobic on a cruise,” Church said.

Marsh smiled. They both knew this was true, but it wasn’t the point. Church withheld a joke about her growing her sea legs, opting to smile back instead.

They broke out the wine and mused about aliens and zombies and other cinematic clichés which may or may not have ended the world. Marsh’s theories, primarily. Church suspected the culprit was far more mundane. A glitch in the banks. An electromagnetic pulse. Nothing inherently apocalyptic. Just enough to galvanize worldwide unease, and the rest would have snowballed.

But after a little wine, gaslighted by those stars that made him small, he might have believed aliens. He might have believed the strangest of things. None stranger than Davy Jones. Maybe Davy Jones could have infected and eradicated humanity, but if so, it had arrived a few months too late.

Church teetered between dreamless sleep and the waking world, but before he could cross over, Marsh draped the blanket over him and slid the bottle from his hands. She lifted his head and mounded him a pillow of sand too. Church didn’t resist, but he never fully winked out. He lay beside the fire, eyes half-open, watching Marsh airplane her arms and tiptoe the shoreline, like she was a kid seeking balance.

While Church feigned sleep, Marsh chose her steps up and down the beach, the bottle ever in hand, but she never drank any. Church couldn’t remember if she had taken a sip all night. Not like before. The early days. The booze runs and the hotel-hopping that had led them to Mr. Marriott. Those days were gone. Could see it in the way she moved. The way she looked at him, then back at the sea. He might have believed she was a mercreature longing for home.

And who was he to prevent her?

For all he knew, the Marriott man also yearned. Again, Church considered bringing him to this very spot, only, unlike Marsh, who had no real interest in the water, the Marriott man would crab-crawl into and under the waves like a newly hatched tortoise. Church could then leave with Marsh and they could tackle the new world together, like the old days. This, for what it was worth, was how Church imagined it would go.

But tonight’s oceanside fire would be their last. A celebratory sendoff for Marsh before she departed. She didn’t need his permission, but she clearly wanted his blessing. Church wouldn’t withhold it, but he would selfishly savor these final moments. Like a child who wasn’t a child anymore, Marsh had outgrown the Palms. The Marriott man had yet to do so; he needed Church, or, maybe, Church needed him. A symbiosis. They had a place here, together, but Marsh no longer did.

When the day came for Marsh to hike north, Church joined her as far as the overpass. They stopped to rest on the hood of an abandoned Jeep and threw crumbs to the birds flocking on the exit ramp. They shared a sandwich and a warm Coke.

“Find me once you’re done here,” she said.

“South Carolina it is.”

They embraced. He pecked her on the cheek, and she kissed him on the mouth. It wasn’t exactly a romantic gesture, but it felt right.

“I know you won’t want me to worry about you, so I won’t.” Marsh looped her arms through both straps of her bag and was already backing away.

“No need. All the trouble’s gone north. Nothing left here.” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

He waved her off until her silhouette shrank with distance and eclipsed the horizon. His gut urged him to go with her, to run after her and see where the End of Days led them, but he didn’t. He hoped to see her again, but hope wasn’t worth much.

The hotel district dug long shadows by the time he returned to the Palms. He sweated from the trek but postponed showering until after fixing the Marriott man dinner. He wasn’t hungry himself.

“I’ll be back in an hour,” Church told him. “Last chapter tonight.”

The man’s eyes marbled under their lids.

Church dumped the bedpan.

The kitchen felt emptier that night. With Marsh gone, the pantry would hold out an extra three months. Church jotted this on the calendar. By the time the food ran out, he would need a new calendar, but he doubted he would care enough to hunt one down. He kept one from the year Rachel had died. Maybe he could reuse it.

He grabbed his radio and a beer and went outside to watch the pool. It was quiet: no Peloton whirring from the second-story balcony. Without Marsh’s pedals trickling juice into their backup generator, Church thought it best to conserve and leave the patio lights off.

He sat in darkness.

When there was no word from Billy Joel above the static, Church flicked the radio off and listened to wind whistling through the dead buildings. He wondered if future archeologists would have better luck than him in deciphering what had happened.

He was about to head inside to finish the Dickens book when movement at the edge of the pool made him go rigid. Silhouettes loomed. They weren’t strays or crocs. He hadn’t seen those in some time. These were tall, man-shaped shadows. These he had only theorized, maybe heard their distant sleuthing at night time and again, but never laid eyes upon. They now huddled at the hotel property fence, laying eyes upon him.

Marriott men.

Church wished he had kept the lights on.

They weren’t crustaceans, nor were they a fiction conjured by a drunken fever dream. They moved like elk—skittish and too quick for their size—and carried a salty, sea-carrion stench. Vestigial flesh dangled and twitched like tentacles from their inner thighs and armpits.

The Marriott men didn’t regard him any more than they might a stray. They scaled the fence with inhuman swiftness and waited while two of their number entered the Palms, slipping through the front doors, as traceless as a breeze. Church anticipated the fitful clatter of overturned furniture and ransacked cabinets, but it never came. The Palms idled in silence, unaware of its penetration. Church sank deeper into his lounger, every moment where nothing happened cinching his heart tighter and tighter. The Marriott men’s icy stillness was enough to drive him mad, and yet their body language suggested no threat. No violence. No concern. Like they weren’t trespassing. Like they were meant to be here and Church was a fly on the wall.

The two man-things returned after a small eternity with Mr. Marriott cradled in their arms, bouncing him like a baby. He slept like a baby. The one bearing him was tall, the alpha of the group, perhaps. His tentacles quivered over Mr. Marriott’s body, latching like thick veins to unnourished flesh. The others gawked. Had Church not known better, he would have guessed their alpha was about to breastfeed Mr. Marriott, but Church didn’t know better and there were no breasts, only amphibious ink-blue skin stretched over a flat chest, patches of Mr. Marriott’s cheeks already turning the same oily hue.

The alpha made unholy cooing noises, which stirred Mr. Marriott from his sleep, but rather than tremble or scream or act in any way surprised to wake to someone other than Church, he grinned and puckered little mewling sounds. He proved cooperative as the tribe of Marriott men embraced him and began gnawing his clothes off with their blunt, omnivorous teeth, revealing similar tentacles and anatomical taboos Church had spent months vying to cure.

Church waited for them to advance on his lounger and eat, dismember, or otherwise end him, but they didn’t. Their pupilless, moon-red eyes never blinked or lingered long on him. They took Mr. Marriott and disappeared over the fence, the Palms having fulfilled its purpose. To them, Church was as dead as the gutted hotels entombing him, unworthy of notice. He was but a relic from another time, another world, a world which had moved on, even if he hadn’t.

He had ordeals before but rarely accompanied by such a strange, inexhaustible urge; a feeling that had been with him right from the start. He thought everything about the place was off-kilter. The shapeless, shuttered windows. The wrangled pitchfork tines hanging from the greased wall. The way the notched beams of the log cabin coupled at the corners, harbouring weird and elusive shades. The sporadic hiss and shriek of a feline or some other thing outside, which bolted him upright from his stool every time.

The men who sat around him had an unusual manner about them. Strangely hypnotic, strangely absurd. It wasn’t their spoken tongue – though he found that maddening too – but the odd way their mouths moved in conversation. When they spoke their jaws hung in mid-air and the tongues coiled and uncoiled inside the mouths, resembling murky, androgynous eels. It made for a bewitching spectacle Mick couldn’t draw away from as they all sat positioned around the head of a barrel shedding cards onto the flat round surface, their knees cosily pressed against the staves. Three of them besides him – Valera, Volodya, Vasya. He tried to remember their names via some rhythmic sequence but for the life of him could not remember which was which, especially in his drink-induced haze. He only knew the bus driver, Valera, who embodied the inert mass slumped in a stool across from Mick bearing an incredibly broad jaw and a thick, ruffled head of hair. The rest of them sat nameless, fading into the surroundings until someone would sporadically shoot up and bellow out some gurgling inanity, incomprehensible to all.

Every one of them brandished glass jars with a strange liquid that shimmered oddly under the light of the ceiling lamp. A sharp, piercing tang when it hit the back of Mick’s palate – something mildly comparable to tequila or a whiskey single malt, but lost among even the strident of beverage aficionados.

He tried to amend his posture on the weakly riveted stool (his spine was in a complete knot from the three-day jaunt). The rickety 70-hour train had taken him through a litany of destinations, from the murder site of Russia’s last tsar (Yekaterinburg) to the industrial dive where Lenin’s corpse was exiled during the Second World War (Tyumen). But it was the half a day spent on a suspension-less marshrutka that had really done him in. The pitiless, Soviet-made minibus mowed over the harsh, mountainous terrain to get to the warren he now found himself in. The single fulfilment he got from it was having the pleasure of comparing it to the image he found on the obscure, low-traffic travel blog that brought him here. He had finally made it.

Mick turned his head to the rear of the cabin, where a charred firewood stove stood with its thin long chimney reaching up through the wood shafts. It crackled and popped in the blaze. The men’s hands blundered on top of the barrel with a rich dissonance; Mick looked at the tattered cardboard lumps in his hand which bore the insignia of playing cards. He tried to participate in the game but was distracted by the smell coming from the gentleman to his left. A vegetal undertone with an unmistakable tinge of samogon. He resembled a still from a travel photography magazine: his thin, wavy beard withered under the neckline of his shirt, and he dispensed loud snores that sent waves of putrid scent in Mick’s direction. Mick imagined a caption accompanying the guy’s photograph on the glossed page of a National Geographic magazine. Bucolic life in the village of Belkovo. Or Domodedovo. Or wherever the fuck he was.

He turned to the barrel-chested driver – Valera. “How far is it to the next village, Valera?”

The other did not respond.

“Kak daleko—?”

“Kak daleko kuda?” grunted the infernal Valera.

“To next village,” Mick replied, moving his hands from top to bottom in a broad curve, like he was stroking a ball. “Next… village.”

Valera eyed him bewilderingly. “Ne ponimayu nitchevo, Misha.”

His voice sounded like an off-tune symphony emanating from his battered larynx. The drink seemed to completely erode his ability to speak and understand English. Mick lowered his right hand into his pocket and clawed out his phone, sending it alight with the glow of a Google tab. His fingers typed out a slew of text, then hit ‘Translate’. He passed the device to Valera. The other read it and let out a satisfying howl. “Ahhh – yes!” He set down with startling gusto to type on the Cyrillic touchpad. Meanwhile, the third man, sitting on Mick’s right, looked on vacuously. This other man hadn’t talked all night, only occasionally looking up to flash a coy grin – a grin Mick couldn’t stomach for reasons beyond his command. The guy’s stiff lip retracted, revealing a stained, toothless gum. It didn’t do much to compensate for the rest of his features.

The heat from the fire gathered in thick waves of mist around the room. Mick was called to its direction by a sharp snap. The burning pine vaporized in a thin rivulet of smoke. He looked at the flickering blaze with hypnotic fixation, rising above the room. He moved through the bulky, congested avenues of Moscow, where the grandeur of Soviet edifices and the wide, people-smelling underpasses had left an unlikely impression on him. He remembered how easy it was to pass the time there, walking – or even staring; at nothing, really. Or maybe, the best of all, indulging his inexhaustible fondness for the local Tinder selection. Those endless collages of slender and bony Slavic women with their elasticized limbs and all-revealing smiles. He was disgruntled that none of them had graced him with the pleasure of their embrace, though he made sure to revel in the decorum their profile photographs had supplied.

Mick was pulled out of his stupor by an approaching arm clenching a phone between its fingers. He reached over the makeshift table and pulled the glowing screen of it up close.

“We are four hours from Tyumen,” the text read.

Mick cleared the screen and fingered a reply. “Where is next village?” he wrote, passing the phone.

Valera took to the keyboard again and hammered out a slew of text. He handed it back. “Village area not village.”

“For fuck sake…” He took a moment to contemplate the message and returned to the keyboard. “How far to the next” – thinking of the best way to phrase it – “occupied settlement.” The phone passed between them like a divine herald.

“20 kilometres east,” Valera’s reply read.

“What is the name?” Mick wrote, passing, receiving.

“Heavenly.”

Mick looked at the text for a while before dropping his head in slow resignation. Google.

He stared back up at the screen. A ‘No Service’ was embroidered across the top bar like an affirmation – of what or who he could not tell. He was recalled to the present by the elusive fire stirring up embers in the oven. Flakes of ash swirling aimlessly around the room, eager to escape their wanton captivity. A cold chill swept across the surface of Mick’s forehead. He sat with hands joined over his thighs, holding up the cards and gazing at the wall behind Valera. Two sagging doorways gleamed back at him. One of them had a huge, fist-sized gap between the closed door and transom, revealing a thick bar of darkness on the other side. Mick stared at it. It stared at him.  Somewhere between the awkwardly-exchanged looks Valera requested for Mick’s phone again. When Mick passed it, Valera took to the keyboard and typed in his drunken vigour.

“Misha let’s, go guessing.”

Mick took a moment to comprehend. He did not have the slightest idea what the gesture implied. He wished for some kind of follow-up or a clue to decipher this cryptic fucking inanity. Instead the giant raised the jar to his mouth and knocked back a good measure of gargle. Bucolic life.

The alcohol gave Valera a renewed sense of zest; he stood erect, brandishing a grin that suspended his boorish features about half an inch. When it ceased, his skin withered back down like a loose drape, hanging down off his cheeks with the light playing curiously between its folds. Still clasping Mick’s phone, Valera brought down his bulging thumb on the screen and produced another slew of text. “We have a magic basement,” it read. “It can show you whether you will have good fortune.”

Valera jumped on his feet suddenly and lugged himself towards the stove, stepping over a stack of tools that lay on a brittle-edged hatch in the floor. Its square shape stood out by the slight inward curve of the timbers. Mick felt a twinge in his bowels of an unpleasant sort. He tried to reason but was overcome with a weird, pulsing sensation. He thought of something. Moscow. Lenin. Anything to distract himself from the nauseating putridness of this place.

“Do you know Lenin?”

Valera’s head turned in a slow, delayed nod.

“Vladimir Lenin,” said Mick, trying to hit home with the name. “Did you know he hired an Irish lad to teach him English while he was living in London?”

Mick looked in Valera’s face for some sign of comprehension, “Irish lad… taught him English.”

The other looked on unresponsively.

“People say he ended up speaking with an Irish accent, Lenin.” He waited a moment then poked his finger toward Valera with declaration, “Your Lenin, spoke with an Irish accent.”

Acknowledging futility, Mick sagged back down in his chair, reflecting on a painful conclusion to his gallivanting, the backpacker’s life he promised himself would bring him some indescribable ecstasy or a meaning to the world he could not foresee. He was done, he thought. No more raking through mud. No more crazed and delirious Russians. No more acting bollocks.

There was a sound of moisture and he turned to see the toothless man’s lips part into a wide curve. The last one – Vasya or Volodya – now lay fully comatose, draped over the back of the chair like a boneless mass. His torso had slid down inertly and his neck was bent with immaculate elasticity, creating a hook that propped his body up on the chair spine. Mick’s eyes shifted back to Valera, who stood on the loose trapdoor chucking stumps of wood into the flames with a look of excitement over his face. He beckoned for Mick’s phone. Mick stared back in trepidation. The queer light and the smell and the ruffling cacophony outside rattled him to the innards. He got up and approached the grinning idiot, putting the phone into his outstretched hand. Valera typed something on the screen and handed it back.

“You need to sit on the edge here and put your feet in,” the text said, “Then wait. If the hand that comes is a hairy hand, it is good sign. If the hand is without hair, it is bad luck.”

Another twinge gripped Mick outright. He looked at the small window on the wall. The twigs beat aimlessly against the loose glass in the night wind. Droopy, rod-like strands of loosestrife and larkspur bonding in lustful accompaniment. Mick looked at Valera and the curved trapdoor beneath the man, scanning his eyes over the chipped edges and the strip of forged iron binding together the timbers. He blurted something. Something like “Bollocks”.

Valera spread his giant buckled legs over the trapdoor and yanked up the ring-pull handle. A shower of dust fell into the pit underneath. Mick could see the marshy ground in the square of light along the bottom. Ruts crisscrossing along the floor, from a bicycle or wheelbarrow or god knows what. Mick caught a glimpse of Valera looking for his attention and looked up to see him standing on one leg, fluctuating his wrist over the raised foot. “Naski snimai.”

Mick hesitated a moment. Then he slowly, as if by instinct, stepped back, leaving his flip flops behind. As if he was not his own command. He followed the action by pinching the hem of his right sock, then peeled it off his foot. Then the left. He did not know why he was doing it. He was commandeered by some divine, unnegotiable force. His eyes darted from one object to another. To the men. Looking for some predictability or an order to things. His eyes stopped on Valera, who was beckoning him to sit at the edge of the hatch, slapping his hand against the chipped timber like a large spatula. “Davai – Come on, come on,” he said in an eastern timbre.

Mick shot a look down into the hole. At the floorboards. Marks of oily residue along those edges. Tiny little clumps of dirt, like a boot sole was scraped across. Mick lowered himself onto the hardwood, staring into the ominous rendition of darkness below him. He planted his backside down, carefully lowering his feet into the gap. First slowly, calculably, and then with a quick, careless release. His body shivered with the cold. Some kind of sorcery, he thought: it must have been twenty-eight degrees outside. He sat for a second or two, rigid, sampling the mellow draught wheezing in from under the house. The hollow floorboards thumped behind him and he turned to see the toothless man slowly approaching. The sneaky culprit circled around him and stood beside Valera and they both stared down at him with unwavering amusement.

The room developed a strange anticipant air about it, like someone’s arrival was forthcoming or a thing that was heretofore absent was now imminent. Mick looked at Valera. The latter wore a strange grin on his face that Mick hadn’t been acquainted with – a meld of curiosity and expectation. His skin paled slowly under the jittering light.

“Aghhhh… Haghhhh!” The spittle flew in every direction as the toothless man recoiled from his sneeze.

“Jesus Christ,” caromed Mick. He turned to look at Volodya or Vasya passed out by the table. Still unmoving. A gravestone. His skeletal frame was caved in over itself and the wispy beard fluttered with each breath like a trick of the light. He hadn’t moved at all.

The combination of nerves and fascination held Mick’s gaze. Eventually, when he turned away, the strange tickling was already felt at his feet. A coarse brushing. Mick sat unmoving for a moment, letting his senses connect, then he felt the unmistakable touch of flesh closing around his ankle, like a retracting noose. He let out a choked yelp and sprang erect like a garden rake, watching everything spinning around him frantically, the faces of the men and the implements on the wall, the barrel and loose cards on its surface. In his frantic dance Mick shot his eyes back into the hole: he saw the shadows copulating and moving and he was standing up on the edge with his fists clenched and the sweat waterfalling down his back. The tinge of adrenaline rushing through him like a rapid stream. He cast a look over at the two men and saw Valera suddenly bowled over, choking himself with laughter. Mick did not move. He could not move. He gathered his breath and after some time enough faculties to mutter some low-pitched variation of “fuck”.

Valera, catching a breath, shouted, “Pyat sekund!” He held up his fingers. “Very short,” he said, “Longer need.”

Mick took a breath and then another and then another again. And once more. The toothless man stood beside Valera with the big gape of his mouth formed into the shape of a grin.

“So which is?” groaned Valera.

“Which is what?”

“Hair, no hair?”

In his paroxysm Mick lost all the sensibility inside him.

“I… fuck. Hair.” He breathed. Paused. “I donno. Fuck that.”

“So is good!” Valera expounded. “You understend? Is means good.”

Mick stared in stupor. Valera chuckled in a soundless, careless manner. Slowly he turned and made his way back to the table. Mick looked down at his legs – blue as Christmas – and thought in his palsied, deluded state: bucolic my arse. When they returned to their seats Mick took a refill of the gangrene-looking drink. Valera still chuckled to himself. He carried a couple of broken sticks to the fire and heaved them into the blaze. The unconscious one still lay in his chair, marinating in a horrible stench of his own devising. Mick sat quietly with the feeble limbs on him drenched of all physical capability. Listening to the restless felines mucking about outside. He did not think about what he experienced. Instead he thought of girls. The Russian girls. The Kalinka. Lenin. He thought he had only a week more to see what was left of the stubborn Siberian steppes. As they sat around the awkward barrel Mick raised the glass jar up to his mouth. Sharp and new. He sat quietly sipping on the concoction, watched as the card game slowly regained dominion. Perhaps, he thought, he would take the week. Take it all. And maybe he would not stow away his backpacker’s days just yet. Maybe, or perhaps, he would use his new strike of luck to continue that venture. And let the rest determine itself.