[Danger Days] The Wasteland - Chapter 18
Title: The Wasteland
Fandom: Danger Days
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison, Kobra Kid/Party Poison
Summary: “At that moment in Battery City, approximately a million and a half sovereign citizens were blamelessly, dreamlessly asleep under Korse’s watchful eye.
Master Post
Chapter 18
Maria found three tires to fit the Trans Am in one of the overflowing sheds out behind the house, but she was short a forth. She handed the keys to her truck over to a skinny teenage kid who was hanging around the place, and he drove it into the city to shop around for the part.
Everyone was on edge, even Grace, though she was better at hiding it than the four grown men in whose care she had abruptly found herself. They all hung around Maria’s place for a while, smoking and snapping at one another. The sun was high and the heat had begun to become intolerable. As near as Ghoul could tell, it had been close to thirty hours since any of them had gotten any sleep at all.
Ghoul knew that what had happened last night with the Dagnys had been a bad mistake, but he could not help but think that he had never felt closer to the others than he had at that moment, when they were all getting their asses thoroughly kicked. They were a team, he thought bleakly, and they must have been a good one to hang together through that humiliation. Now, however, the danger had passed and so had the sense of camaraderie. Kobra was back to being an asshole, and Jet was back to being a nag, and Poison was once more acting like he’d never given a shit about anything in his life.
It was enough to make you want to puke, Ghoul thought. It was enough to make you hate that you had to have other people around at all. Without telling anyone that he was leaving, Ghoul slipped out the back door and into the desert.
They weren’t that far inland. Ghoul followed the smell of salt until he found the ocean. The beach was just a thin strip of gravel, slimy with seafoam and decaying kelp. Ghoul decided he liked it better than the tourist beaches, because it had always been lonely and neglected like this.
By the time Poison found him, the sun was already low in the sky, just crossing the boundary between afternoon and evening. Ghoul had seen him coming from a long way off, but he did not walk back to meet him. He assumed that Poison had come to fetch him, that they were all waiting on him so they could go.
What he really wanted to do was turn away and act like he hadn’t seen anything, but he didn’t think Poison would understand.
“Come with me,” Poison said, when they were close enough to speak.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“Why?”
“I just want to show you something.”
Poison was bad about a lot of things, but he had never actually been untrustworthy. With a sigh, Ghoul followed him. They walked up the highway until a dune rose up between them and Maria’s place and took the house from their sight.
“I’m glad we’re alone,” Poison said.
He had not meant for it to sound ominous, but to Ghoul it did, and so he said nothing.
There was no sign outside the little hotel that Poison took him to, but they found it without any trouble at all. Ghoul could not imagine when Poison had made time to look for this place, or even to ask anyone about it, but he’d clearly been planning this for some time. Ghoul watched him while he unfolded a couple of the new twenties and handed them over to the owner. His expression was immobile, unreadable. Every time Ghoul thought he had him figured out, Poison pulled something like this. He knew that he ought to resent him for it.
Poison came back to him. He was clutching a room key very tightly in one hand, but when he took Ghoul’s arm with the other his touch was light, almost hesitating.
“What are you doing?” Ghoul said.
Poison didn’t answer. He led Ghoul around the corner of the hotel. It was a big, square, Spanish-style building. Two stories, with a courtyard in the middle that hadn’t been kept up in a long time; all the trees were dead and the fountain was broken and drained of water.
“Do Kobra and Jet know we’re here?” Ghoul pressed. “Do they know you’re blowing our money on... whatever this is?”
Poison stopped at one of the doors. He jabbed the key into the lock like slipping a blade under someone’s ribcage. He let Ghoul go inside first. The room was small, clean, very dark. White linen curtains were pulled across the only window, and when Ghoul flipped the light switch only one of the four bulbs in the fixture hanging from the ceiling lit up. There wasn’t much furniture, but a big bed stood against the far wall. Ghoul stared at it, as if he did not understand what it was.
“I remembered what you told me,” Poison said quietly “This was what you wanted. This would make you happy. That’s what you said, right?”
Ghoul turned around a kissed him hard to stop him from talking. Poison’s lips kept moving for another moment before he realized what was happening. He set his hands lightly on Ghoul’s hips and eased him back. Conscientiously, he shut the door and locked it. Then he unlocked it again.
“I can go,” he said. “You can just stay here for tonight. You can do whatever you want.”
“What if I want to take your clothes off?”
Poison looked at him in his bemused, serious way without saying anything. Ghoul tried to hold his eyes. He wanted Poison to know that he was making an effort, that whatever had gone wrong between them, he didn’t think it was beyond fixing. But the last words he had spoken kept echoing through his head, becoming sillier and more theatrical with each repetition.
At last, he couldn’t keep from laughing any longer.
Poison didn’t laugh with him, but he screwed his eyes up and showed his teeth in an awkward smile. It was good enough for Ghoul; he couldn’t even remember the last time he had seen him amused. He reached past Poison’s hip and snapped the lock shut.
“There’s a shower,” Poison said. “If you’d like to use it first.”
Ghoul laughed again, but this time with an edge to it. No one knew how to kill the mood quite like Poison did. But then again, a chance at a real shower, with hot water and everything, didn’t exactly come along every day. Even back in Battery City, the safe houses where the pipes worked like they were supposed to had been few and far between. Since they’d come to the desert, there hadn’t even been that. Water was too precious to waste on bathing. Ghoul knew he must have smelled pretty bad by now - that they all must have - but it had been months since he’d noticed it at all.
“Do you-do you mind?” he asked quietly.
“I would not take offence,” Poison said.
Feeling his face flush, Ghoul slipped out of Poison’s arms. This whole business had the taint of guilt to it, of shame, as if he were getting away with something he had not earned. He slipped off quickly, without looking back, as if he were afraid that Poison would change his mind and take it all away again.
The bathroom was not much bigger than a closet, and all lacquered in white tile. Ghoul massaged the wall until he found the light switch, and flipped it on. A long time had passed since he’d been anywhere with regular power, but he hadn’t really missed it and he didn’t dread the idea of going back to living without. They could have this night together, he and Poison, but it would exist outside of the continuum of their normal lives. It would remain an afterthought, a scratched chapter in the epic story of the wasteland.
It took a while tinkering with the knobs to get the water the right temperature. Once he had it, Ghoul stripped off his clothes quickly and got in before anything could go wrong. At first, it seemed he could feel each individual drop of water, a thousand tiny not-unpleasant needles pricking against his skin, but that sensation quickly faded, blurring together into a steady, pulsing torrent.
The water swirling around his ankles ran black, then gray, then finally clear. Ghoul felt like he’d shed a couple of layers of skin, scraped them off like a snake rubbing itself against a rock. His throat seized, and a hot bubble of agony expanded in his chest. He was crying, he realized with numb horror. His eyes burned with tears, and his breath kept coming in hitching gulps, three or four of them in quick succession every time he tried to inhale. He fell forward and his head hit the shower wall with a solid thump. It seemed he had an inexhaustible reservoir of tears, and he stayed like that for a long time, letting the cool tile soothe his burning face and the hot spray of the shower wash over the rest of him.
After a while, Poison came into the bathroom. Ghoul didn’t look up when he pulled the shower curtain back and got in. “I was afraid you were using all the hot water,” he said. “I thought I wouldn’t mind, but I guess I did.”
“It’s all right,” Ghoul told the wall. He felt Poison’s hand slide up his back, and he turned around to face him. Poison didn’t seem to notice that he had been crying, though Ghoul supposed his eyes must have looked pretty red. He drew him back, under the water. “It feels good, right?”
“Yes, it does.”
Ghoul rubbed his cheek against Poison’s shoulder. He could feel the sharp edge of his collarbone, the slats of his ribs. He’d lost a lot of weight since they had come out here; both of them had.
“You know,” Ghoul said. “This is the first time I’ve seen you naked.”
“So it is.” Poison lowered his head, and his wet hair flopped over his face. “I wish it didn’t always have to be like this. Every time we’re together, it feels like we’re doing something wrong. It’s like we’re taking something that doesn’t belong to us. I wish I could do more for you. If I went back to my father, then maybe-“
“Don’t,” Ghoul said. “I know that’s not what you want. And even if it was, then what? It’s not like you could bring me home to meet your parents and we could all just pretend that none of this ever happened, right?”
“I don’t have parents,” Poison said. “I only have him.”
“Fuck him.” Ghoul stroked Poison’s hair back so he could see his eyes. They were unfocused, staring blindly at the wall. “You’ve got me. And I love you.”
“I…” Poison lifted his head slowly. He stammered a little, like he was trying out several words before he settled on the one he really wanted. It wasn’t like him at all. “I feel the same way.”
Ghoul laughed. “Poison, you dork.”
Poison’s mouth turned up into a wary, halting smile. “I love you too.”
It took a second for it to sink in, but when it did Ghoul’s heart leapt. He had been too cautious to actually think those simple, stupid words would change anything. But they did.
“That’s more like it,” he said, and made a grab for Poison’s wrists. They struggled a little under the water, and Ghoul ended up with his back against the wall, pinned under Poison’s weight. Right where he had expected he’d end up, and right where he wanted to be.
Poison bent and kissed him. When Ghoul pressed his hips up against him, he could feel Poison’s cock, already halfway hard. “Have you ever, you know, done it in the shower before?”
“Once or twice. Why do you ask?”
“Is it nice?”
“Anywhere is nice with you.”
Ghoul looked down to hide the blush that came over his cheeks. Poison brushed his lips over his temple. “Let me take you to bed.”
“Wait.” Ghoul gave him a nudge with his hip, and Poison let him go. “I want to wash my clothes out.”
He got out of the shower, grabbing a towel and cinching it around his waist. When he glanced back and saw the look on Poison’s face, he laughed. “Come on, I haven’t had clean underwear in like two weeks. We basically never get a chance like this. Since when am I the practical one?”
“And since when am I the romantic one?” Poison said. He stepped out from under the water, not bothering with a towel. He really did look good naked, Ghoul thought. Hard living didn’t seem to have dome much damage to his pale skin or the delicate arrangement of his limbs.
While Poison went out to turn down the bed, Ghoul collected the two piles of their discarded clothes. They’d left a black ring around the tub, which he did his best to avoid as he rinsed everything out. He was very conscientious, very thorough; he didn’t rush at all. He remembered the first time he and Poison had fucked - that rough, hard, desperate coupling in near-silence on the concrete floor of Poison’s cell - and he was ashamed that he no longer felt the same frantic desire. They had both changed too much. There was no going back now.
Ghoul hung his jeans up on the showerhead to dry, and followed Poison out. Poison had already turned off the lights, and Ghoul’s eyes were slow to adjust. He dropped his towel and groped his way over to the bed. When he was close enough, Poison took his hand and guided him down beside him. The mattress squeaked beneath his weight.
“This is nice,” he said. Poison’s lips were exploring his shoulder, the hollow of his collarbone, the bend of his neck. Ghoul laughed. “Don’t you think this is nice?”
“This is nice,” Poison confirmed. He drew Ghoul around into a kiss.
Everything else fell away. Everything else ceased to matter. At last, they were alone together, but neither of them was really there at all. They had become hands, lips, murmured words and harsh breaths. All the extraneous worries and jealousies and fears burned away, leaving only that which was tactile, immediate, necessary.
And Ghoul felt it again, the old familiar sense of urgency, coursing through him, surging out into him with every pulse of his heart. The need to run, to run forever, and see where he ended up.
Afterwards, they lay a little apart from each other, on opposite sides of the bed. Ghoul could hear the ocean, very faint and far away. It was cold in the little room, but he was soaked with sweat. He slid his palm across the sheets, worn soft and downy from many washings, until he found Poison’s hand, and then he clutched it tight.
When Poison began to speak, it was in hesitant and fitful bursts, too fragmentary and disjointed to be a proper story. He seemed to feel that there was something here, something he wanted Ghoul to know or understand, and with time and with luck he might happen upon it.
Ghoul said nothing. He knew that Poison did not want his pity or his sympathy; he only wanted him to listen while he talked. About Better Living, about his father. About the lab where he had been created and the dozens of failures that had come before him. About everything he’d had, and everything that had been taken from him, and everything he had willingly surrendered. And finally, about the things that had been done, by him, for him, to him, all to make him stronger and crueler and more efficiently merciless.
He fell silent at last. Ghoul let a full minute go by before he turned over on his side to face him.
“Poison,” he said, and touched his cheek. His skin felt very cold, like marble or glass.
“Yes?”
Ghoul hesitated. He hadn’t thought Poison would actually expect him to say something. “You know, I’m here. If you ever need me.”
“I do know that. Thank you.” He caught Ghoul’s hand and dragged it around to his lips. “Earlier, when you said that you loved me, I knew at once that you meant it. My father never said anything like that to me. Even when he came to me at night, when he did those things, I thought, maybe I could have forgiven him, if he’d only told me it was because he loved me. But he would not have made a mistake like that. He wanted me to know my place. I wasn’t even worth the trouble of lying to.”
“He’s a bad person,” Ghoul said. “I’m sorry that there isn’t a better explanation than that. He’s bad, and he tried to make you like he is, but you’re not. He hurt you, but you’re free of him now, and one day he’ll be dead. That’s the best any of us can hope for.”
Poison turned slowly to face him. Behind Ghoul’s hand, he was smiling. “You make me feel better.”
“That’s good.”
After that, there was nothing left to say. Ghoul lay awake for a long time, and he did not know whether Poison was asleep or not. Eventually, the line between consciousness and oblivion became blurry and porous. And he no longer knew himself which side of it he was on.
***
At that moment in the wasteland, Prester John was reading by moonlight a passage from Job that he knew by heart. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Bible was old. It had belonged to the person he had once called sister, before he had been Called from that life.
The binding was dry and cracked from the heat. Sometimes the pages came loose in Prester John’s hands. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
A coyote screamed out in the dunes. It sounded very near. Prester John looked up sharply. His heart was pounding, and his mouth tasted like metal. It was a full five seconds before he realized he was afraid.
He laughed, and went back to his reading. He had lost his place. Rather than try to find it again, he went, calmly and without frustration, back to the beginning: There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright.
***
And at that moment in Battery City, the Manskinner was awake in the basement of a condemned building near Better Living Laboratory. He did not feel tired, though he had not slept in over 24 hours. He was not hungry, though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. At ten minutes past midnight, he would climb out onto the street and, with steady hands, line the road with mines. At 12:30, if his intelligence was correct, a transport carrying new troops would leave the Lab and make its way towards Better Living Towers.
He would hear the explosion, but he would not see it. He would already be far away.
If things had been different, it was the kind of mission he might have entrusted to Frank. But Frank had been gone for months now, and the Manskinner rarely thought of him anymore. Until he heard differently, he would assume that he was alive and that he was doing what he wanted.
The Manskinner was disappointed, but he was not angry. He could not have been angry even if he had wanted to, for he had loved Frank more than all the rest of them. Because he had saved him, and he had raised him, and, until he ran out, he had been able to point to him and say, Look. It wasn’t a waste. It was not all for nothing.
***
At that moment in the wasteland, the Dagnys were splitting up the take from the suitcase they had delivered the night before. Rockefeller divvied it up to the last dollar, rewarding each of them in proportion to their contribution.
She knew that the transmission in Astor’s bike was about to drop out, but she didn’t care. This was the way it was in her Utopia, built upon suitcases of shitty impure drugs and the dirty money of the Colorado Compound.
***
At that moment, Grace crept out the backdoor and shut it silently behind here and stood without moving, without even breathing, until she had counted to ten.
No sound came from inside. No one had noticed her go.
Feeling her way with her hands, she slipped off the edge of the porch and crouched in the shadow of the house. She pulled a tattered handkerchief out of the pocket of her jacket. There were three tortillas rolled up inside, cold now and beginning to turn stale around the edges.
Grace ate them all, one after another, not tasting a thing but feeling the big unchewed lumps moving down her insides.
She thought, how nice it would be to die and become a ghost. La Llorona. Needing nothing, noticed by no one.
***
At that moment somewhere outside of Juarez, El Chupacabra was sitting in a bar with a known member of one of the Baja cartels. He had just confessed to losing the Salton shipment. The cartel man laughed and patted his shoulder. They leisurely finished their beer, and when El got up to leave the cartel man pulled out a switchblade and casually murdered him.
***
And at that moment in the wasteland, Dr. Death was wrapping up the broadcast day. He tried, as always, to think of what they would have said back in school, something profound and comforting and true. But all that came to mind were sentimental clichés.
He poured a half inch of whiskey into the dirty pint glass at his elbow and drank it down without tasting it, without even feeling it burn. He switched off the transmitter and sat for a full minute, listening to the dead air hum in his ears.
When shall I be as the swallow? Datta. Dayadhvan. Damyata. Shanti, shanti, shanti.
***
At that moment, Crow Jane was on her hands and knees, searching underneath the generator for a lost screwdriver. She had heard the broadcast end, and come out here to take down the antenna. She was tired and her shoulders ached; after the heat of the day, the night seemed very cold. When Jane had first come to the wasteland, there had been a lot of things she was afraid of but the work had never been one.
Life out here was not hard for them in any appreciable way. The hours were short, most of their needs were provided for by grateful exiles. Aside from the two daily broadcasts, there was almost never anything to do. Once, Jane had thought she would never be able to do enough for them, enough to make up for being left behind when so many others had been hauled off to Alameda Street Jail. But somehow, over the course of years and so gradually that she had not even noticed it happening, it had all become too much for her.
Too much of the same thing, over and over, day after day. Reports of death and despair flooded in from the wasteland, and flooded out again over the radio, and there was nothing she could do to change it, nothing she could do to ease the suffering of even one single person out there.
It was too late now. Too late to wonder if things could have been different, better, anything at all.
Too late, even, to wonder what it might have been like if she’d picked up a gun instead of a pen when she’d had the chance.
***
At that moment, Jet Star and Kobra Kid were drunk.
It had not escaped Kobra’s notice that this had become a frequent occurrence for them. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it had gone from a matter of convenience to a private ritual, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to.
He’d never thought he’d become an alcoholic. That was for people with fewer options, fewer resources, then he had. Never thought he’d become Jet’s friend either, but here he was.
“I wonder where that kid ran off to?” Jet said, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned for her. It didn’t look like he was about to get up and go stumbling around the place looking for her.
Thank god for that. At least there was that. It didn’t take a licensed counselor to see that the last thing that kid needed was some old fucker full of tequila and good intentions fumbling around after her.
“Forget the kid,” Kobra said. “Where’s Poison?”
“No, forget Poison. He can take care of himself.”
Kobra laughed, a loud humorless exhalation. “Your priorities are all fucked. You’ve forgotten how to be a father and what it’s like to be a little kid.”
“What would you know about that? Sometimes I think you weren’t born at all. You just crawled out of the sand one day, full grown and carved out of wood.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Kobra said. “You’re really wrong. But fuck you anyway for saying it.”
Jet leaned back in his chair and looked Kobra over curiously, without spite. “Sorry, kid. You know I didn’t mean that. I was just…”
“You were just thinking it. And you feel like you have to say every stupid little thing that pops into your goddamn head.”
“I guess you got me there, kid.”
Kobra couldn’t tell if he was being patronizing, but he hoped that he wasn’t. He didn’t want to fight with Jet; he just wanted him to sit there and soak up a little abuse. He could probably handle it. Kobra poured himself another drink, and said, “I know who I am. And I know where I came from, and I know where I’m going. And I even know the name of my father, which is one more thing than I ever asked for.”
Jet sucked in a deep breath. He seemed about to say something, but at the last second he changed his mind, or he forgot. They sat in silence for a while, drinking.
“Shit,” Kobra muttered. “Where the hell did Poison go anyway?”
***
At that moment, Maria tightened the last bolt on the last wheel of the Trans Am. She wiped her hands on a rag, wiped the wrench too. Soon, she would go in and put the kettle on and make a cup of chocolate. While the water boiled, she would sweep out all the corners to make the house ready for morning.
Four clean corners and four new tires. She felt a small, not-unwelcome swelling of pride.
***
At that moment in Battery City, approximately a million and a half sovereign citizens were blamelessly, dreamlessly asleep under Korse’s watchful eye.
Korse almost never slept anymore. He needed only two or three hours a night. More than that, and he started to lose his edge. He had not left Better Living Towers in months, and he knew that his driver no longer came for him at the end of the day. At night, he wandered the dark, uniform halls until he inevitably found his way to the Department of Interior Security.
Seven thousand cameras mounted on street corners throughout the city, all of them broadcasting back to a single room. Korse sat amongst the feeds and watched the city which both repulsed and compelled him.
He saw a hundred transgressions committed in every quarter of the city, but he did nothing. It made him feel very indulgent and merciful. Things could stay this way a little longer, until Gerard returned to Battery City. Then, all hell was going to break loose.
Fandom: Danger Days
Rating: NC-17
Pairings: Fun Ghoul/Party Poison, Kobra Kid/Party Poison
Summary: “At that moment in Battery City, approximately a million and a half sovereign citizens were blamelessly, dreamlessly asleep under Korse’s watchful eye.
Master Post
Chapter 18
Maria found three tires to fit the Trans Am in one of the overflowing sheds out behind the house, but she was short a forth. She handed the keys to her truck over to a skinny teenage kid who was hanging around the place, and he drove it into the city to shop around for the part.
Everyone was on edge, even Grace, though she was better at hiding it than the four grown men in whose care she had abruptly found herself. They all hung around Maria’s place for a while, smoking and snapping at one another. The sun was high and the heat had begun to become intolerable. As near as Ghoul could tell, it had been close to thirty hours since any of them had gotten any sleep at all.
Ghoul knew that what had happened last night with the Dagnys had been a bad mistake, but he could not help but think that he had never felt closer to the others than he had at that moment, when they were all getting their asses thoroughly kicked. They were a team, he thought bleakly, and they must have been a good one to hang together through that humiliation. Now, however, the danger had passed and so had the sense of camaraderie. Kobra was back to being an asshole, and Jet was back to being a nag, and Poison was once more acting like he’d never given a shit about anything in his life.
It was enough to make you want to puke, Ghoul thought. It was enough to make you hate that you had to have other people around at all. Without telling anyone that he was leaving, Ghoul slipped out the back door and into the desert.
They weren’t that far inland. Ghoul followed the smell of salt until he found the ocean. The beach was just a thin strip of gravel, slimy with seafoam and decaying kelp. Ghoul decided he liked it better than the tourist beaches, because it had always been lonely and neglected like this.
By the time Poison found him, the sun was already low in the sky, just crossing the boundary between afternoon and evening. Ghoul had seen him coming from a long way off, but he did not walk back to meet him. He assumed that Poison had come to fetch him, that they were all waiting on him so they could go.
What he really wanted to do was turn away and act like he hadn’t seen anything, but he didn’t think Poison would understand.
“Come with me,” Poison said, when they were close enough to speak.
“Where?”
“You’ll see.”
“Why?”
“I just want to show you something.”
Poison was bad about a lot of things, but he had never actually been untrustworthy. With a sigh, Ghoul followed him. They walked up the highway until a dune rose up between them and Maria’s place and took the house from their sight.
“I’m glad we’re alone,” Poison said.
He had not meant for it to sound ominous, but to Ghoul it did, and so he said nothing.
There was no sign outside the little hotel that Poison took him to, but they found it without any trouble at all. Ghoul could not imagine when Poison had made time to look for this place, or even to ask anyone about it, but he’d clearly been planning this for some time. Ghoul watched him while he unfolded a couple of the new twenties and handed them over to the owner. His expression was immobile, unreadable. Every time Ghoul thought he had him figured out, Poison pulled something like this. He knew that he ought to resent him for it.
Poison came back to him. He was clutching a room key very tightly in one hand, but when he took Ghoul’s arm with the other his touch was light, almost hesitating.
“What are you doing?” Ghoul said.
Poison didn’t answer. He led Ghoul around the corner of the hotel. It was a big, square, Spanish-style building. Two stories, with a courtyard in the middle that hadn’t been kept up in a long time; all the trees were dead and the fountain was broken and drained of water.
“Do Kobra and Jet know we’re here?” Ghoul pressed. “Do they know you’re blowing our money on... whatever this is?”
Poison stopped at one of the doors. He jabbed the key into the lock like slipping a blade under someone’s ribcage. He let Ghoul go inside first. The room was small, clean, very dark. White linen curtains were pulled across the only window, and when Ghoul flipped the light switch only one of the four bulbs in the fixture hanging from the ceiling lit up. There wasn’t much furniture, but a big bed stood against the far wall. Ghoul stared at it, as if he did not understand what it was.
“I remembered what you told me,” Poison said quietly “This was what you wanted. This would make you happy. That’s what you said, right?”
Ghoul turned around a kissed him hard to stop him from talking. Poison’s lips kept moving for another moment before he realized what was happening. He set his hands lightly on Ghoul’s hips and eased him back. Conscientiously, he shut the door and locked it. Then he unlocked it again.
“I can go,” he said. “You can just stay here for tonight. You can do whatever you want.”
“What if I want to take your clothes off?”
Poison looked at him in his bemused, serious way without saying anything. Ghoul tried to hold his eyes. He wanted Poison to know that he was making an effort, that whatever had gone wrong between them, he didn’t think it was beyond fixing. But the last words he had spoken kept echoing through his head, becoming sillier and more theatrical with each repetition.
At last, he couldn’t keep from laughing any longer.
Poison didn’t laugh with him, but he screwed his eyes up and showed his teeth in an awkward smile. It was good enough for Ghoul; he couldn’t even remember the last time he had seen him amused. He reached past Poison’s hip and snapped the lock shut.
“There’s a shower,” Poison said. “If you’d like to use it first.”
Ghoul laughed again, but this time with an edge to it. No one knew how to kill the mood quite like Poison did. But then again, a chance at a real shower, with hot water and everything, didn’t exactly come along every day. Even back in Battery City, the safe houses where the pipes worked like they were supposed to had been few and far between. Since they’d come to the desert, there hadn’t even been that. Water was too precious to waste on bathing. Ghoul knew he must have smelled pretty bad by now - that they all must have - but it had been months since he’d noticed it at all.
“Do you-do you mind?” he asked quietly.
“I would not take offence,” Poison said.
Feeling his face flush, Ghoul slipped out of Poison’s arms. This whole business had the taint of guilt to it, of shame, as if he were getting away with something he had not earned. He slipped off quickly, without looking back, as if he were afraid that Poison would change his mind and take it all away again.
The bathroom was not much bigger than a closet, and all lacquered in white tile. Ghoul massaged the wall until he found the light switch, and flipped it on. A long time had passed since he’d been anywhere with regular power, but he hadn’t really missed it and he didn’t dread the idea of going back to living without. They could have this night together, he and Poison, but it would exist outside of the continuum of their normal lives. It would remain an afterthought, a scratched chapter in the epic story of the wasteland.
It took a while tinkering with the knobs to get the water the right temperature. Once he had it, Ghoul stripped off his clothes quickly and got in before anything could go wrong. At first, it seemed he could feel each individual drop of water, a thousand tiny not-unpleasant needles pricking against his skin, but that sensation quickly faded, blurring together into a steady, pulsing torrent.
The water swirling around his ankles ran black, then gray, then finally clear. Ghoul felt like he’d shed a couple of layers of skin, scraped them off like a snake rubbing itself against a rock. His throat seized, and a hot bubble of agony expanded in his chest. He was crying, he realized with numb horror. His eyes burned with tears, and his breath kept coming in hitching gulps, three or four of them in quick succession every time he tried to inhale. He fell forward and his head hit the shower wall with a solid thump. It seemed he had an inexhaustible reservoir of tears, and he stayed like that for a long time, letting the cool tile soothe his burning face and the hot spray of the shower wash over the rest of him.
After a while, Poison came into the bathroom. Ghoul didn’t look up when he pulled the shower curtain back and got in. “I was afraid you were using all the hot water,” he said. “I thought I wouldn’t mind, but I guess I did.”
“It’s all right,” Ghoul told the wall. He felt Poison’s hand slide up his back, and he turned around to face him. Poison didn’t seem to notice that he had been crying, though Ghoul supposed his eyes must have looked pretty red. He drew him back, under the water. “It feels good, right?”
“Yes, it does.”
Ghoul rubbed his cheek against Poison’s shoulder. He could feel the sharp edge of his collarbone, the slats of his ribs. He’d lost a lot of weight since they had come out here; both of them had.
“You know,” Ghoul said. “This is the first time I’ve seen you naked.”
“So it is.” Poison lowered his head, and his wet hair flopped over his face. “I wish it didn’t always have to be like this. Every time we’re together, it feels like we’re doing something wrong. It’s like we’re taking something that doesn’t belong to us. I wish I could do more for you. If I went back to my father, then maybe-“
“Don’t,” Ghoul said. “I know that’s not what you want. And even if it was, then what? It’s not like you could bring me home to meet your parents and we could all just pretend that none of this ever happened, right?”
“I don’t have parents,” Poison said. “I only have him.”
“Fuck him.” Ghoul stroked Poison’s hair back so he could see his eyes. They were unfocused, staring blindly at the wall. “You’ve got me. And I love you.”
“I…” Poison lifted his head slowly. He stammered a little, like he was trying out several words before he settled on the one he really wanted. It wasn’t like him at all. “I feel the same way.”
Ghoul laughed. “Poison, you dork.”
Poison’s mouth turned up into a wary, halting smile. “I love you too.”
It took a second for it to sink in, but when it did Ghoul’s heart leapt. He had been too cautious to actually think those simple, stupid words would change anything. But they did.
“That’s more like it,” he said, and made a grab for Poison’s wrists. They struggled a little under the water, and Ghoul ended up with his back against the wall, pinned under Poison’s weight. Right where he had expected he’d end up, and right where he wanted to be.
Poison bent and kissed him. When Ghoul pressed his hips up against him, he could feel Poison’s cock, already halfway hard. “Have you ever, you know, done it in the shower before?”
“Once or twice. Why do you ask?”
“Is it nice?”
“Anywhere is nice with you.”
Ghoul looked down to hide the blush that came over his cheeks. Poison brushed his lips over his temple. “Let me take you to bed.”
“Wait.” Ghoul gave him a nudge with his hip, and Poison let him go. “I want to wash my clothes out.”
He got out of the shower, grabbing a towel and cinching it around his waist. When he glanced back and saw the look on Poison’s face, he laughed. “Come on, I haven’t had clean underwear in like two weeks. We basically never get a chance like this. Since when am I the practical one?”
“And since when am I the romantic one?” Poison said. He stepped out from under the water, not bothering with a towel. He really did look good naked, Ghoul thought. Hard living didn’t seem to have dome much damage to his pale skin or the delicate arrangement of his limbs.
While Poison went out to turn down the bed, Ghoul collected the two piles of their discarded clothes. They’d left a black ring around the tub, which he did his best to avoid as he rinsed everything out. He was very conscientious, very thorough; he didn’t rush at all. He remembered the first time he and Poison had fucked - that rough, hard, desperate coupling in near-silence on the concrete floor of Poison’s cell - and he was ashamed that he no longer felt the same frantic desire. They had both changed too much. There was no going back now.
Ghoul hung his jeans up on the showerhead to dry, and followed Poison out. Poison had already turned off the lights, and Ghoul’s eyes were slow to adjust. He dropped his towel and groped his way over to the bed. When he was close enough, Poison took his hand and guided him down beside him. The mattress squeaked beneath his weight.
“This is nice,” he said. Poison’s lips were exploring his shoulder, the hollow of his collarbone, the bend of his neck. Ghoul laughed. “Don’t you think this is nice?”
“This is nice,” Poison confirmed. He drew Ghoul around into a kiss.
Everything else fell away. Everything else ceased to matter. At last, they were alone together, but neither of them was really there at all. They had become hands, lips, murmured words and harsh breaths. All the extraneous worries and jealousies and fears burned away, leaving only that which was tactile, immediate, necessary.
And Ghoul felt it again, the old familiar sense of urgency, coursing through him, surging out into him with every pulse of his heart. The need to run, to run forever, and see where he ended up.
Afterwards, they lay a little apart from each other, on opposite sides of the bed. Ghoul could hear the ocean, very faint and far away. It was cold in the little room, but he was soaked with sweat. He slid his palm across the sheets, worn soft and downy from many washings, until he found Poison’s hand, and then he clutched it tight.
When Poison began to speak, it was in hesitant and fitful bursts, too fragmentary and disjointed to be a proper story. He seemed to feel that there was something here, something he wanted Ghoul to know or understand, and with time and with luck he might happen upon it.
Ghoul said nothing. He knew that Poison did not want his pity or his sympathy; he only wanted him to listen while he talked. About Better Living, about his father. About the lab where he had been created and the dozens of failures that had come before him. About everything he’d had, and everything that had been taken from him, and everything he had willingly surrendered. And finally, about the things that had been done, by him, for him, to him, all to make him stronger and crueler and more efficiently merciless.
He fell silent at last. Ghoul let a full minute go by before he turned over on his side to face him.
“Poison,” he said, and touched his cheek. His skin felt very cold, like marble or glass.
“Yes?”
Ghoul hesitated. He hadn’t thought Poison would actually expect him to say something. “You know, I’m here. If you ever need me.”
“I do know that. Thank you.” He caught Ghoul’s hand and dragged it around to his lips. “Earlier, when you said that you loved me, I knew at once that you meant it. My father never said anything like that to me. Even when he came to me at night, when he did those things, I thought, maybe I could have forgiven him, if he’d only told me it was because he loved me. But he would not have made a mistake like that. He wanted me to know my place. I wasn’t even worth the trouble of lying to.”
“He’s a bad person,” Ghoul said. “I’m sorry that there isn’t a better explanation than that. He’s bad, and he tried to make you like he is, but you’re not. He hurt you, but you’re free of him now, and one day he’ll be dead. That’s the best any of us can hope for.”
Poison turned slowly to face him. Behind Ghoul’s hand, he was smiling. “You make me feel better.”
“That’s good.”
After that, there was nothing left to say. Ghoul lay awake for a long time, and he did not know whether Poison was asleep or not. Eventually, the line between consciousness and oblivion became blurry and porous. And he no longer knew himself which side of it he was on.
***
At that moment in the wasteland, Prester John was reading by moonlight a passage from Job that he knew by heart. Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there. The Bible was old. It had belonged to the person he had once called sister, before he had been Called from that life.
The binding was dry and cracked from the heat. Sometimes the pages came loose in Prester John’s hands. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.
A coyote screamed out in the dunes. It sounded very near. Prester John looked up sharply. His heart was pounding, and his mouth tasted like metal. It was a full five seconds before he realized he was afraid.
He laughed, and went back to his reading. He had lost his place. Rather than try to find it again, he went, calmly and without frustration, back to the beginning: There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright.
***
And at that moment in Battery City, the Manskinner was awake in the basement of a condemned building near Better Living Laboratory. He did not feel tired, though he had not slept in over 24 hours. He was not hungry, though he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. At ten minutes past midnight, he would climb out onto the street and, with steady hands, line the road with mines. At 12:30, if his intelligence was correct, a transport carrying new troops would leave the Lab and make its way towards Better Living Towers.
He would hear the explosion, but he would not see it. He would already be far away.
If things had been different, it was the kind of mission he might have entrusted to Frank. But Frank had been gone for months now, and the Manskinner rarely thought of him anymore. Until he heard differently, he would assume that he was alive and that he was doing what he wanted.
The Manskinner was disappointed, but he was not angry. He could not have been angry even if he had wanted to, for he had loved Frank more than all the rest of them. Because he had saved him, and he had raised him, and, until he ran out, he had been able to point to him and say, Look. It wasn’t a waste. It was not all for nothing.
***
At that moment in the wasteland, the Dagnys were splitting up the take from the suitcase they had delivered the night before. Rockefeller divvied it up to the last dollar, rewarding each of them in proportion to their contribution.
She knew that the transmission in Astor’s bike was about to drop out, but she didn’t care. This was the way it was in her Utopia, built upon suitcases of shitty impure drugs and the dirty money of the Colorado Compound.
***
At that moment, Grace crept out the backdoor and shut it silently behind here and stood without moving, without even breathing, until she had counted to ten.
No sound came from inside. No one had noticed her go.
Feeling her way with her hands, she slipped off the edge of the porch and crouched in the shadow of the house. She pulled a tattered handkerchief out of the pocket of her jacket. There were three tortillas rolled up inside, cold now and beginning to turn stale around the edges.
Grace ate them all, one after another, not tasting a thing but feeling the big unchewed lumps moving down her insides.
She thought, how nice it would be to die and become a ghost. La Llorona. Needing nothing, noticed by no one.
***
At that moment somewhere outside of Juarez, El Chupacabra was sitting in a bar with a known member of one of the Baja cartels. He had just confessed to losing the Salton shipment. The cartel man laughed and patted his shoulder. They leisurely finished their beer, and when El got up to leave the cartel man pulled out a switchblade and casually murdered him.
***
And at that moment in the wasteland, Dr. Death was wrapping up the broadcast day. He tried, as always, to think of what they would have said back in school, something profound and comforting and true. But all that came to mind were sentimental clichés.
He poured a half inch of whiskey into the dirty pint glass at his elbow and drank it down without tasting it, without even feeling it burn. He switched off the transmitter and sat for a full minute, listening to the dead air hum in his ears.
When shall I be as the swallow? Datta. Dayadhvan. Damyata. Shanti, shanti, shanti.
***
At that moment, Crow Jane was on her hands and knees, searching underneath the generator for a lost screwdriver. She had heard the broadcast end, and come out here to take down the antenna. She was tired and her shoulders ached; after the heat of the day, the night seemed very cold. When Jane had first come to the wasteland, there had been a lot of things she was afraid of but the work had never been one.
Life out here was not hard for them in any appreciable way. The hours were short, most of their needs were provided for by grateful exiles. Aside from the two daily broadcasts, there was almost never anything to do. Once, Jane had thought she would never be able to do enough for them, enough to make up for being left behind when so many others had been hauled off to Alameda Street Jail. But somehow, over the course of years and so gradually that she had not even noticed it happening, it had all become too much for her.
Too much of the same thing, over and over, day after day. Reports of death and despair flooded in from the wasteland, and flooded out again over the radio, and there was nothing she could do to change it, nothing she could do to ease the suffering of even one single person out there.
It was too late now. Too late to wonder if things could have been different, better, anything at all.
Too late, even, to wonder what it might have been like if she’d picked up a gun instead of a pen when she’d had the chance.
***
At that moment, Jet Star and Kobra Kid were drunk.
It had not escaped Kobra’s notice that this had become a frequent occurrence for them. He couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment it had gone from a matter of convenience to a private ritual, and he wasn’t even sure he wanted to.
He’d never thought he’d become an alcoholic. That was for people with fewer options, fewer resources, then he had. Never thought he’d become Jet’s friend either, but here he was.
“I wonder where that kid ran off to?” Jet said, but he didn’t seem particularly concerned for her. It didn’t look like he was about to get up and go stumbling around the place looking for her.
Thank god for that. At least there was that. It didn’t take a licensed counselor to see that the last thing that kid needed was some old fucker full of tequila and good intentions fumbling around after her.
“Forget the kid,” Kobra said. “Where’s Poison?”
“No, forget Poison. He can take care of himself.”
Kobra laughed, a loud humorless exhalation. “Your priorities are all fucked. You’ve forgotten how to be a father and what it’s like to be a little kid.”
“What would you know about that? Sometimes I think you weren’t born at all. You just crawled out of the sand one day, full grown and carved out of wood.”
“You’re wrong about that,” Kobra said. “You’re really wrong. But fuck you anyway for saying it.”
Jet leaned back in his chair and looked Kobra over curiously, without spite. “Sorry, kid. You know I didn’t mean that. I was just…”
“You were just thinking it. And you feel like you have to say every stupid little thing that pops into your goddamn head.”
“I guess you got me there, kid.”
Kobra couldn’t tell if he was being patronizing, but he hoped that he wasn’t. He didn’t want to fight with Jet; he just wanted him to sit there and soak up a little abuse. He could probably handle it. Kobra poured himself another drink, and said, “I know who I am. And I know where I came from, and I know where I’m going. And I even know the name of my father, which is one more thing than I ever asked for.”
Jet sucked in a deep breath. He seemed about to say something, but at the last second he changed his mind, or he forgot. They sat in silence for a while, drinking.
“Shit,” Kobra muttered. “Where the hell did Poison go anyway?”
***
At that moment, Maria tightened the last bolt on the last wheel of the Trans Am. She wiped her hands on a rag, wiped the wrench too. Soon, she would go in and put the kettle on and make a cup of chocolate. While the water boiled, she would sweep out all the corners to make the house ready for morning.
Four clean corners and four new tires. She felt a small, not-unwelcome swelling of pride.
***
At that moment in Battery City, approximately a million and a half sovereign citizens were blamelessly, dreamlessly asleep under Korse’s watchful eye.
Korse almost never slept anymore. He needed only two or three hours a night. More than that, and he started to lose his edge. He had not left Better Living Towers in months, and he knew that his driver no longer came for him at the end of the day. At night, he wandered the dark, uniform halls until he inevitably found his way to the Department of Interior Security.
Seven thousand cameras mounted on street corners throughout the city, all of them broadcasting back to a single room. Korse sat amongst the feeds and watched the city which both repulsed and compelled him.
He saw a hundred transgressions committed in every quarter of the city, but he did nothing. It made him feel very indulgent and merciful. Things could stay this way a little longer, until Gerard returned to Battery City. Then, all hell was going to break loose.