Hi I'm a Social Disease: Horror Stories (2 page)

I looked into the surrounding darkness and took a deep breath. Loss was nothing new. I wasn’t even close to her. If I started grieving for people I didn’t know then I had a whole life of grief in front of me. Every day people died. Every day people disappeared.

I went back into the building. Back into my room. Despite having drunk an entire bottle of whiskey, unconsciousness wouldn’t come back. I began to wish I had stockpiled it so I would have something else to dive into.

I had never experienced the night like this before. It was maddening. I sat in the chair, watching the static and listening to hear if she ever came back. Toward dawn the electricity started flickering and I knew this was the beginning of the end. Not that it mattered to me anyway. I hadn’t allowed myself to become reliant on any of the appliances. I only kept the television on because I thought I should use something.

Once it was full on morning, I went to the store to get some more whiskey. I almost passed out on the way there. How was it that I could stay up all night and now that the air was bright I felt like I would fall asleep if I shut my eyes? I was so tired I felt sick.

I made it back to the building, put the whiskey on the cardboard end table, and screamed myself to sleep.

She was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. I had to do it. I had to go up to her room to see if she was okay. I took a slug of the whiskey to fortify my nerves and began the long walk down the hall and toward the stairs. The stink, as I drew closer to Grangely’s, was increasingly nauseating. It was one thing to be a fucking cannibal but you’d think he’d clean up after himself. He didn’t have to be so unashamed about it.

I climbed the dark and rickety staircase, waiting for my foot to drop through one of the boards, until I reached the second floor.

Down the hall to Room 29.

The door was ajar. I pushed it inward. It smelled like flowers and meat inside. Something light and pretty over something black and rotten. I didn’t want to snoop but, well, there wasn’t anything better to do. My conscience wasn’t what it used to be. Besides, it didn’t look like there were a lot of things to snoop through, anyway.

The three boxes she had brought with her were turned on their sides on the floor at the bottom of the far wall. Notebooks were lined up on top of them. They looked swollen and puffy like they had been left out in the rain. Her room had a bed and I wondered how many people had died in it. On top of the bed sat another notebook. It was the old kind of composition book with the black and white, vaguely bovine, pattern.

I really shouldn’t have.

But I had to. Because there wasn’t anything else to do and, I rationalized with myself, if she never came back, this would be a way to remember her. I imagined what I was about to go through was a journal. How could the pages of a journal live if no one ever reads them? I knew it was more than that. I knew I was going to read it because I wanted her. I wanted to possess some small part of her and if I was too much a coward to try and get inside her physically then this was how I’d do it mentally.

I opened up the notebook.

I expected to see the hasty scrawl of handwriting. That’s what a journal was, wasn’t it? That’s not what I saw at all. It was an oblong, crusty, crimson-black mass. It looked like a scab. I flipped the pages with a mixture of disgust and intrigue. More of the same. One per page. I closed the notebook and went over to the other notebooks arranged on the boxes. The first two I opened were empty. Perhaps those were for the future. But the rest of them were filled with more of the same. Scabs. I was sure of it. These were diaries of scabs. I ran my fingers over them. The ones on the boxes were drier, older. Bits of them had flaked off and were smashed between the pages. Some of them came away on my fingertip. I stuck it in my mouth. It tasted like blood, come back to life on my tongue. I put the diary I presently held back on the cardboard box and arranged them as they were originally, neat and orderly. Then I went back to the bed and flipped through that one. This must be the latest one. The scabs inside this one seemed fresher, hanging on to the blue-lined pages with more intensity.

I sat down on the bed and continued to flip through it, running my fingers over them and wondering what the point of this was. Really, what was the point of anything anymore?

I thought of her melancholy weeping. Was that what it sounded like when she cut herself? Did she do that to let some of the pain out? I had dreamed about reading her diary and possessing a little of what was inside of her but this was greater than I could ever have imagined. I probably stayed in her room for two hours. Then my insides were crying to pour out so I left the diary where I had found it, went back down to my room, released myself to the screams, and drank myself into a coma.

When I woke up it was dark and all the electricity had gone. That made it official, I guessed. The end was here.

The next two days continued like all the ones before it only now I spent a bit of time in Anita’s room, lost in her diaries and wondering if she would ever come back. Then, after being gone for four days, she did.

Unfortunately, I was busy looking through her diary when she entered the room. A rare thunderstorm was upon us, turning the dim afternoon nearly nighttime black. She startled me but I immediately realized I had been caught.

“
What are you doing?” she said.

I held up the diary. “Looking through this.”

Her left arm was missing below the elbow. A yellowish bandage covered the stump.

“
What happened to your arm?”

“
You know... You know what I’ve been doing up here, don’t you?”

“
I think I do.”

“
I cut myself too deep. I had to go look for help. I don’t want to die, you know? It just feels like something I have to do.” She paused and held her right arm up to her chest. “Like your screaming.”

“
Yes.”

It was then I decided I was going to kill her. She had crossed the room and was arranging her past diaries. Her dirty sundress was up above her blue stockings again and it was then I decided everything was hopeless. I would kill her and keep her for my own because I couldn’t stand the thought of that beast Grangely gnawing on her. Her being in the apartment was something. She was the promise. The promise of everything missing. I would kill her and then I would kill myself. I realized I would never see her in anything but that yellow sundress and blue stockings, the screams would never go away, the electricity would never come back, the whiskey would run out, and the sun was never going to show its face again. I had already done some very bad things and the dead world was rotting around me.

I turned my attention back to the diary I held in my hand.

“
You shouldn’t just read people’s diaries right in front of them,” she said.

“
I know.” I closed it and stared out the darkened window at the nothing darkness outside. “I came up here to warn you.”

“
Warn me? You didn’t need a reason to come up here. I’m surprised it took you this long. What were you going to warn me about?”

“
Grangely.”

“
Who’s that?” she whispered from behind me.

“
The landlord.”

“
The landlord?”

“
Yes, he lives downstairs.”

“
No one lives downstairs except you.”

I laughed. “You’ve had to have seen him. The fat guy. The one who smells so bad. Anyway, when the tenants die, he eats them. And he makes excursions out into the city at night. He brings back all kinds of things.”

“
Things? Like people?”

“
Yeah. Sometimes.”

“
That’s horrible. That’s how I lost my sister. At least, that’s what everybody suspects.”

I felt her weight on the other side of the bed. I thought about turning around but didn’t want to spoil everything. I could imagine her hot breath on the back of my neck. It had been so long since I had felt anything like that. Would I actually get to possess her?

“
That’s a shame,” I said.

“
It is. She used to go to this little corner store for candy. She went there just about every day. Usually she took a grownup along with her but you know how candy is... It’s like an addiction after a while. Somebody got her. Apparently, he got quite a few people. He was keeping them in a deep freezer of the store’s cellar. He would keep them there and go back every day, eating little pieces of them, cooking them on a portable grill in the store’s office. They sifted through the ash and found Sis’s earrings.”

She said that and I had an image of the cellar. The owners had lived above the store and had apparently used the cellar for their own storage. They had died a long time ago.

“
Guess he’s shit out of luck now that the electricity’s finally gone,” she said.

“
Yeah,” I mouthed but my throat had closed up.

She leaned over me and I felt her hot breath on the back of my neck and cold steel pressed to the front. I looked down and saw the handle. It was the kind of straight razor no one had used in a very long time, even before the end of the world.

“
I always wondered why you were always screaming until I saw that. Weiv hve been looking for you for a very long time. You know, most everybody else has really come together. I’ve seen people do things I didn’t know they were capable of. Good things.”

“
You can kill me,” I said. “I deserve it.” What else could I say? This would be the best way to go. Visions of lynch mobs filled my head. There was no point in fighting back. Even if she was a one-armed girl.

“
I’m not going to do that. We can use you.”

Outside, I noticed lights from a car. I still wasn’t entirely sure of all the things I had done but I knew they were bad and I knew it was me who had done them. Within the next few seconds the room was swarming with people, most of them tired and hungry and hostile. They were not very gentle with me.

They brought me to a hospital. It’s a hospital for some, a laboratory for others, and a prison to many. They never told me anything directly but, since I was now human waste, they talked about me like I wasn’t there so I heard a lot of things. They had discovered the nature of the plague. They thought they were close to figuring out how to reverse it. It was the only way. To reverse it. To regrow what had rotted on our insides. No one used the word soul. I was recruited.

I’ve become an experiment. I sit writing this with a third hand growing out of my forehead. It’s all a sick joke. They wanted to see if I could develop my dexterity with this new hand. I wanted to ask about Anita. I wanted to ask if she still kept her scab diary. I wanted to ask them if any of them knew why she kept that diary in the first place... You have to admire the human spirit—we’ll continue building things just so someone else can watch them fall. I wish I could put the pen down and run my fingertips over Anita’s scabs because that was what we were leaving behind and that was what we were working so hard to build. Bloody crusts over wounds.

I haven’t seen her again.

Now I sit here and keep my own diary, written in the pus from a hundred different infections.

Market Adjustment

1.

New York—October 28, 1929

“
A hotdog, mister?”

“
Got any money?”

Myron Barnes patted his tattered overcoat, knowing he didn’t have any money. He caught the vendor’s eye and tossed his hands out to the side. “I ain’t had no money for days. Thought I might find somethin.” Myron turned away. “I understand. You got a business you’re tryin to run.”

“
Hold up now. I think I can spare one.”

Myron turned back around to face him. Their eyes stayed locked and the vendor’s motions were mechanical, assembling and wrapping the hotdog, handing it across the cart to Myron.

“
Jeez, thanks mister. When I make my fortune I’ll make sure to pay you. Consider this a loan.” He held up the hotdog before taking a big hungry bite of it.

“
I wouldn’t count on that. Don’t think nobody’s makin money today. Head down to Wall Street, you’ll see a whole lotta panic. That is… unless you got somewhere else to go.”

“
I think you and me both know I don’t.”

“
Enjoy. I think a whole lotta people’s about to join you.”

Myron turned his back on the vendor with a dismissive wave. He took another bite of the hotdog and headed toward Wall Street. The vendor’s words stung him. Had it become that obvious he lived on the street?

Luckily, Myron thought, he still had his youth and some vestige of his looks. Maybe it was just his eyes. Somehow he was able to compel people to do things for him. Maybe they just saw poverty and desperation. So, yeah, he lived on the street, but it wasn’t hard to find some girl to take him in for the night. More often than not, he had a place to sleep. And he had the Enclave.