“Brains” © 2014 Jeremiah Wolfe
Todd lost a finger to the dining room door. He sighed and looked at where it lay on the edge of the carpet’s bare spot like a tiny sunbather on the shore of a dry lake. Shaking his head, he picked it up and took it to Connie.
Connie retrieved needle and thread, and sat down with Todd at the little table in front of the kitchen fan, beside the blinds which hadn’t opened in so long that they’d probably break if anyone tried. In the murky glow which drifted through, others came to the kitchen and blinked over shoulders as Connie’s needle dipped and rose. Everyone was eager to pick up little repair skills these days. Like backyard mechanics hunched over an open hood, they pointed, caught little tricks with their eyes and pulled them apart with their words. The more who shared these skills, the better. The nine of them were falling apart a little more this past few decades, and one never knew when Connie might be caught outside and not come home again.
Roger turned on the news, but couldn’t stand it after ten minutes. Another war. The same war they had seen one or two lifetimes ago, played over like a tired, depressing rerun. But no one outside was old enough to remember. It was new to them. So they marched off to the grinder, its blades still caked with blood a few generations old.
Edward and Bernice found refuge in gallows humor. They counted back to the last financial crisis: thirteen years, five months, nine days between the domestic crash and the declaration of war on foreign soil. Bernice won the bet, though Edward wasn’t far off. He waxed poetic about cycles and habits of behavior, quoted Nietzsche and Dyson.
Roger couldn’t stand them when they were like this, and went upstairs. He took out his paints, cracked the attic blinds and started another landscape of that view. 137 paintings of the same view crowded the basement. Those buried in dust were of fields or rising buildings. On those stacked near the water heater, glow and bustle ripened. Near the stairwell, that glow waxed into decay, a macabre time-lapse in oils. Those closest to the thin, creaking steps were layered with unlit shadows in mars black, cast by crumbling walls in burnt sienna mixed with cadmium yellow, caked with the scars of urban death to the corners of the canvas. The Neighborhood of Dorian Gray.
Smoke rose in broad whorls on tonight’s canvas, ruddy with dying sunlight, roiling florid like a fat, angry drunk above the wastes of downtown. The city had missed a meal again, and the residents would try to make food by kicking down doors and walls, and setting old car bodies alight.
The riots would make the news tomorrow, that twenty minutes when gossip about celebrities paused. Roger was no longer convinced that celebrities existed, not as anything other than brief fiction and created pictures. He would skip tomorrow’s news.
To his mind, there had been no unique story since the discovery of a virus which extended the motions of life long after clinical death. A quick clamor and grab for the labs working on it, and a few dozen researchers who disappeared with the only samples, so long ago. Generations had come and gone since then. The only time the rest of the world remembered was when one of them was discovered, the mob eager to rub and bite and consume, try to catch what they had, followed by an instant disappearance when industry or what passed for government managed to get a hold of what was left.
Albert hadn’t come home for four years, the latest to be caught and recognized outside. They had been twenty-two when they sought refuge in the big old house, but now they were nine.
Roger painted, Edward read, Bernice typed. Connie rosined her bow and began to pull Paganini from her cello. The noise helped to keep prowlers from trying the doors. Outside, the gunfire started at dusk, sporadic and scattered, like the snarls of roaming wolf packs. The city worked at night in this way; in the morning it passed out, drunk on squalor. It dreamt of constant celebrity gossip fiction on the radio, while larger guns started overseas.
None of them slept much anymore, which was perhaps part of the pathology, so Bernice wrote about that. Edward talked to her about Voltaire, and she wrote about that. A conversation on French philosophers between two friends with nearly six centuries between them had not occurred before on Earth; the perspectives were unique, to say the least. So Bernice wrote them down. In a world unable to offer many other perspectives at all anymore, perhaps they were doubly valuable.
Edward joked about talking Bernice’s ear off, not quite funny after Todd’s finger. Nothing lasted forever. Feeling was the first thing to go. The body held together, but was more easily persuaded to come apart. No fast movements, no heavy lifting, and be careful of contact. Exercise was a bad idea, sex downright suicidal. There was time left only for the mind. But there was plenty of time for that.
Before the sun came up, feet scrambled at the porch roof, boots kicking the gutters while arms pulled at a rope thrown over the rambling elm which crowded the eaves. But the rope’s knot was a clumsy, incompetent thing that dumped the would-be burglar in the dirt to scramble back into the street. It was best for him. The intellects indoors had devised layers of traps based upon principles no longer taught in the city’s non-existent schools. Nowadays, hunger taught people to wait for the food dumps, lust created a basic sort of currency, and the fictional celebrities became the pinnacle of any time spared for thought.
Roger shook his head at the window. It had seemed such a blessing to live in an affluent nation, where entertainment was innovative, needs were easy to meet, and government was recognized as an unnecessary annoyance for most, one which could be foisted upon those strange few who enjoyed that sort of thing.
Inside, the zombies chased what raised humanity above the animals.
Outside, the humans staggered, and moaned, and craved brains.