Apocalypticon (19 page)

“Really?”

“Sure. You saved my freakin’ life! The least I can do is give you a ride. Which way is Memphis?” she asked.

“That way,” he pointed, looking to Patrick for confirmation. Patrick nodded.

“Oh! Awesome, it’s on the way!” she said excitedly. “We don’t even need gas to get there!” She slapped her knees and popped up to her feet. “Let’s do it!”

Ben nodded smugly.
Conversation domination.

6.

With the help of two makeshift paddles, they ran aground in Lee Park a few hours before dawn. “Are you sure this is it?” Ben yawned, squinting into the gloom. More fires burned here than anywhere else along the river, it’s true, but there wasn’t exactly a flashing neon sign welcoming them to Memphis.

“Either Memphis or Giza,” Patrick said, pointing just northeast of the park. A river breeze thinned the fog near the shore, and in the glow of early morning fires they could just make out the outline of a giant pyramid, its point lost in a low, sickly brown cloud.

“What is that thing?” asked the girl, who had given her name as Lucy.

“The first structure ever built in Memphis,” Patrick answered. “Completed by the ancient Egyptian settlers in 1237 B.C.”

“Wow,” she whispered, her eyes big as half dollars.

Ben shook his head at Patrick. “There’s something wrong with you,” he muttered.

They secured the boat, then fell into a somewhat heated debate. Patrick wanted to head off east immediately and get a few miles under their feet before sunrise, but Ben desperately wanted sleep. They had rested poorly on the train, he argued, and paddling for the last 18 hours under Patrick’s sadistic command had earned him very few winks. Patrick insisted that the river was a dangerous place to stay, too open and strategically poor for a retreat if they happened to be attacked on land. They had no way of knowing what sort of terrifying hellmouth the Mississippi River coastline had descended into since M-Day, and without the relative safety of the train with its armed guards, they needed to start being smart. Getting away from the river would be safer.

“You think downtown Memphis at 3 am is the
safe
option?” Ben asked, incredulous. Patrick set to work trying to formulate a logical response to this, when suddenly they heard a gentle snore coming from the boat. Lucy had settled the argument by falling asleep.

They set up what little camp they could, draping their two blankets across the top of the speedboat and tying one end down with the short length of rope. They each chose one blunt weapon to cuddle through the night, in case of attack, then laid the rest of the armory out just behind the boat on the shore so they would be easily accessible in an emergency. They pulled on their extra layers of clothes to ward off the cold and hunkered down in the makeshift fort, Ben in the stern, Patrick in the bow, and the snoring bottle blonde in between. Ben noticed her shaking in her sleep. “You have anything else in your bag you can cover her with?” he whispered. Patrick hesitated. “What? What is it?”

“Well...technically, yes.”

“Okay. So. Go get it.”

Patrick frumped. “I don’t want to.”

“Why not?” Ben hissed.

“Because it’s not meant for sleeping in!”

“Oh, for crying out loud. It’s forty degrees, if you have something to cover her with, cover her. Look at her, for God’s sake.” She shivered harder now, her hands instinctively rubbing her thin shoulders in her sleep. Patrick sighed. He crawled over to his bag and pulled out a large, white shirt with two red birds perched on a bat embroidered on the front over the word Cardinals. He unbuttoned it and draped it over Lucy’s shoulders. Even in the darkness of the covered boat, the scarlet letters spelling out MOLINA were eminently visible.

“You stole a jersey?” 

“Well he wasn’t wearing it!” Patrick hissed. “It was in the locker room. I think if he wanted it, he would’ve stopped by the stadium at some point in the last three years!”

“No wonder you were gone so long. What else did you take?”

“Nothing!” Patrick cried. He crossed his arms and rolled over, facing away from his bunkmates. He clutched his bag angrily and shoved it under his head, punching it with his ear to dig a comfortable divot among the supplies inside. “That jersey is extremely important to me, Ben Fogelvee, and if Ditzy Darla drools on his uniform, you’re paying with your kidneys.”

•

Patrick awoke to the cold, hard slap of steel across his face. “Wake up.”

“Ow!” he cried, rubbing his cheek. A long, wide welt had instantly started forming. “What’s the matter with you?” He looked up and saw a tall, thin African-American man standing over him with Patrick’s machete in hand.

“Wake up,” the man said again.

“I’m awake! Cripes. Give me back my machete.”

“No.”

Patrick sat up. The blankets had been tossed back from the boat, and Ben and Lucy were already awake. They were being secured by more newcomers, their arms pinned sharply behind their backs. There were six assailants in all, and each one of them held at least one of Patrick’s and Ben’s weapons.
Note to self
, Patrick thought miserably.
Hide weapons while sleeping
.

“You come with me,” the man with Patrick’s machete said. “Madame Siquo is expecting you.”

Patrick shook his head, trying to wake up his brain. “I think you’ve got the wrong guy.”

“No,” the man said again. “You are Mouse Hunter.” His voice was surprisingly deep, especially for how thin and frail he looked. He wore a gray knit cap with a long tassel and an olive green vest with no shirt underneath, despite the chill in the air. He was skinny, but lean and ropy, and therefore much more than a physical match for Patrick, who was skinny, and just skinny. Plus, the man had the machete. And Patrick seemed to have misplaced his hammer in his sleep.

“I’m the what?” he asked, wiping his bleary eyes.

“Mouse Hunter,” one of the other men piped up.

“Mouse Hunter,” they all agreed, bobbing their heads.

“You are Mouse Hunter. Madame Siquo waits.”

“There’s been a misunderstanding, here. I’m not Mouse Hunter. I would never hunt mice. I’m scared to death of ‘em. Ben, tell him.”

“It’s true,” Ben admitted. “He’s a pansy.”

“A pansy,” Patrick confirmed. “See? Sorry for the confusion. If I could just—“ He moved to take the machete from the thin man. The man slapped his hand with the flat blade.

“Madame Siquo says you come with us, or I cut off your head.” He placed the sharp end of the blade against Patrick’s neck.

“Ah...I think I should discuss this with Madame Siquo in person,” he said, gingerly pushing the blade away from his windpipe. “Not because you threatened me, mind you. But because I want to, for the sake of diplomacy.” The man grunted and stood back, allowing Patrick to climb out of the boat. His right leg had fallen asleep, and he stumbled on his way over the side, crashing face-first into the dead grass. He wanted to stay down on the ground and die. This was just the most humiliating morning of his life.

The tall man grabbed him by the arms and lifted him easily to his feet.
Yes, I shan’t be challenging this man’s strength
, thought Patrick, who could barely heft his own backpack. “What about the boat?” he asked. “Who’s staying with the boat?”

“All will stay. You and I will go alone.”

“Oh good. A blind date from the Eighth Circle of Hell.” He shot Ben a pleading look that said,
Get me out of this
, but Ben only shrugged and motioned with his eyes toward the men and their weapons. “I was right,” Patrick said, glaring. “You, sir, are no Batman.”

The thin man led him silently across the park and up the hill to Riverside Drive. They turned left and stalked along the quiet road. The fog was still thin, allowing a better panoramic than Patrick had seen in months. It was just a pity that all there was to see was Memphis.

He’d been to Memphis a handful of times in his life, and it seemed like every time he visited, the town was just a little worse -- a little poorer, a little more rundown, a little less appealing. The M-Day catalyst had sped up this devolutionary process exponentially, and now the home of blues and rock ‘n’ roll was little more than a burned out pile of building-sized litter. Everywhere he looked, windows were broken out and boarded up. Some buildings had fallen over, covering the streets with bricks and sheet tin for blocks. Broken glass crunched underfoot at every step. Trash fires burned in barrels, some unmanned, others warming crude derelicts with long, dirt-matted hair and ripped clothes stained with their own waste.

All in all, it was pretty much the Memphis he remembered. Just more so.

They turned right onto Beale Street and had to climb over a pile-up of rusty clunkers stacked nearly as high as the railroad bridge overhead. In a dusty field to the right, a gang of teenagers took batting practice at a line of broken bottles and the occasional ambler-by. They scattered when they saw the thin man trudging up the street.

“I must be pretty intimidating,” Patrick said.

“They know I walk with Madame Siquo. They respect her power.”

“Seems a little more like fear,” Patrick observed.

The thin man nodded his gaunt head. “They are the same.”

Patrick sighed. He was really not looking forward to this meeting.

A few blocks down, they passed the Orpheum. Its fire escape had been torn from the brick wall and now lay dead in the street. They climbed over the rusty brown staircase, avoiding sharp corners and thick bolts. “I saw The Pixies here once,” Patrick mused aloud. “The bassist fell off the stage and gave some girl a concussion.”

“It is home to Reverend Wharton’s congregation now.”

“Oh. Baptists?”

“Satanists.”

Patrick shrugged. “Same thing.”

They reached 2nd Street, the western edge of the Beale Strip, which was hilariously still cordoned off from vehicular traffic with broken and battered plastic white barriers. Surprisingly, fewer fires burned along the street beyond 2nd, and the occasional passerby became more and more rare. Either the darkened lights and the missing music made this a dead zone to those who remembered its heyday, or else the Strip was still what it had always been, a hovel for tourists to be largely avoided by the locals.

Patrick noted with sadness the dead and broken neon lining the street. Beale had once been so alive with color and light, even when the rest of the city cowered in the darkness and gloom of poverty. Now, most of the neon signs had been smashed, their glass tubes paving the street in tiny shards. The sign for B.B. King’s had half broken off its brick building and hung ominously over the street at a 45 degree angle. The skull of Tater Red’s leered darkly beneath his top hat. The brick and plaster guts of Beale Street Tap Room were blown across the middle of the street, apparently expelled from the old brick building by way of some explosive or other. The entire Strange Cargo building tilted precariously over the hole left by the explosion.

The thin man led Patrick up over the loose mound of bricks in the road. Pat nearly stumbled on a twisted bar stool but caught himself by grabbing a doorframe jutting up from the brown brick mess. He slid down the other side and followed the man to the entrance of Pig. Up above, the large, round sign of a flexing hog was mostly intact, as was a plywood board next to the entrance that read, “BIG ASS BEER TO GO.” Most of Pig’s windows were boarded up, but one of the doors was accessible and even retained unbroken plates of glass in its metal frame. A bald, muscular man in jeans and a tight black sweater sat on a stool outside of the door. He stood when he saw Patrick and the thin man approach. “Mouse Hunter?” he asked. The thin man nodded. The guard opened the door and ushered them in.

Another guard sat just off to the left, picking at his fingernails with a rusty nail. Patrick nodded politely. The guard spat a stream of thick, brown juice onto the floor.

“You wait here,” the thin man said. He disappeared behind a curtain in the back of the room.

Patrick looked around. The windows were all blocked up, and candles provided the only light, but there were enough of them scattered around the room to see. Most of the restaurant was still in good shape, all things considered. The floor was grimy with years of grease and tread, but most of the black linoleum tiles remained, and the bare, scored concrete was only visible through a handful of squares. The tables and chairs had been pushed up against the northern wall as a barricade against the boarded windows and second entrance, leaving the majority of the seating area completely open. Posters and tin signs still hung on the walls, showing the rich history of Memphis and teasing the viewer with yellowing photographs of steaming barbecue.

The curtain rustled, and the thin man reappeared. “Madame is ready for you,” he said, gesturing beyond the curtain. Patrick took a deep breath.
What the hell
, he thought.
Memphis is as depressing a place to die as any
.

He stepped through the curtain. The thin man let it fall behind him, cutting him off from the main room. Patrick climbed three rickety stairs to a raised platform that might have served as a stage at one time. Now it was a sitting area; four mismatched chairs surrounded a small, round, wooden table. In the furthest chair from the stairs, a high-backed piece of furniture with red velvet upholstery, sat an old woman. Thick ropes of hair the color and consistency of steel wool draped down her back and around her long, oval face. Her skin was the color of burned wood. She had sharp, bony features, weathered and hardened with age. A trio of candles burned low on the table, their dim light reflecting off the woman’s milky white eyes.

“Welcome, Mouse Hunter,” she said in a voice as dry as sand. She gestured to the armchair opposite her own. Patrick sank cautiously into it. He was almost certain the woman was blind, yet she seemed to be following him with her chalky white eyes.