On waking, I found I’d undone my jacket and placed it over myself as a makeshift blanket; Mal, glaze-eyed looked on from where she’d posted across from me in the hall—she hadn’t slept. All the hours stolen from me by the jailor in the Golgotha cell seemingly caught up to me and if it had not been for that, I’d likely not slept at all.
“You’re awake,” said Mal.
“How long?” I asked; I pushed myself up from where I’d slumped.
“Few hours.”
“How is it?” I looked at the door.
“No one’s banged on it for a while, so I haven’t let anyone in. The other noises have stopped too, and I think that dragon’s moved on. Maybe? Maybe not—I heard big footfalls. It’s hot as hell though.” The woman shrugged. “Fires, right? It’s all going to be ash when we check topside.”
I peered down the hall, over the bodies which remained in the hall; those able enough dispersed and those that were left were either dead or cared for the dead.
“Everyone was talking about it,” Mal locked eyes onto mine, “You were supposed to hang today. Feel lucky?” A dry chuckle escaped her. “It’s a joke,” she assured me. “Really.”
“I reckon. Maybe I should have. Hung, that is.”
“It’s funny. Only the guards and the bullet-crafters were supposed to be allowed down here. Bosses too, of course. Now it’s all we’ve got. Everyone that’s alive is here now.” She nodded as if to solidify this to herself.
“Family?” I asked her.
Without elaborating, she nodded.
“Here?”
She then stared down the hall, ignoring the question.
“Why don’t you go on to the bunks? You look about dead.”
“Don’t know if I could sleep if I wanted to.” Mal shrugged whatever concern I offered.
Remembering, I found the pipe on the floor by where I’d been and began to pack it with tobacco; I smoked in silence and Mal was right—it was hot as hell. Golgotha was in flames. The smoke was so incredibly faint from the underground, but it was like the smell when sniffing it off clothing. Present. Subtle.
The groups which remained became their own factions and each one gathered food or weapons and everyone pitched in where able. The injured were taken to the bunks off the main hall and treated. Some would still die; others, though non-ambulatory, would surely recover if given the time. Among the faces in the flickering halls were wall men and peasants alike. The duality. Even Lady tempered her proselytizing. The bodies were moved further down the hall, placed in darkened rooms where the friends or family of the dead could mourn in relative solitude. Though Lady did not keep at her shrillness, she did light candles (from whatever places she’d found them) and kept with those mourning if only for company. The duality.
Those which cared to pitch in with cooking did so and though there were kitchens, we cramped in the rooms nearest the surface and cooked together over portable stove eyes. Some cried alone and others found laughter in it; black humor cured the sickness for some. The duality. Skitterbug-infested folks were there along with the rest and though blinded or incapacitated, they did what they were able. In tragedy, the will to do was good enough it seemed.
I hated them. Every single one. Mal and all. The ignorance of a species. Duality is well enough for observation, but where was that willpower in the face of oppression? Who was to say? I am no great secret-keeper for the human condition, and I am no anthropologist. I do not have the keys to the vehicle of mankind, but I know that I’ve looked at them so often and seen the hypocrisy. I hated them.
Yet, there I was—just as well. Alongside the others, I helped in the gathering of supplies, in the quick jokes which pass for camaraderie in the heat of manual labor. The duality? Doesn’t matter. I was no different. Whatever hate in my heart, it was dissolved in the chatter and there I was, eating and drinking among them and though I kept to myself, it was a crisis, and everyone spoke as they are to do in crises. Possibly it’s the panicked cry for survival.
The alcohol reserves were ransacked and any time a teary-eyed soul decided to arrive from the dead-rooms of mourning, they were brought in among us ravenously, given food, given a cup for drink, and there wasn’t time to ruin it. Us organisms reveled there on the cusp of death. Who knew what was to come?
We arranged ourselves across bunks and ate on beds like they were tables and sat cross-legged by the overhead fluorescent lights. Those bulbs cast a weird glow across our faces—especially once put in tandem with the orange flames of the portable stoves.
No one asked me about kissing the ass of Devils and no one singled me out and, in the crowd, I was totally lost in the best way possible; it could have been the drink. In lulls we all stopped and listened to the aboveground noises. Being so close to the entryway, we could hear the destruction—even though it was such a present factor in our time in the underground, it became totally unreal. In those lulls, it was apparent that we could hear creatures, massive things (I imagined Leviathan and the skin takers), crash around.
But the whispering would come on in tides and wash up into a great many conversations. Those folks told stories about the dead and the lost and how they hoped they’d find them after all was done; there were so many affirmations—of course the loved-ones would be found; there was no doubt.
As the dinner—that’s what it was—carried on, the mother from before pushed away from her mourning. It was the woman whose daughter was killed in front of her; Mal tensed up beside of where I sat. I expected the mother to lunge at the wall man, but she did not. Instead, she creased her face in a macabre demonstration that was like a smile and asked if we had anything hard. With a cup which Mal gave her, she took to drinking quickly and did not speak to anyone more than a bit; we learned her name was Jessica. Somewhere in the crowd I recognized the boy I scuffled with; the boy that disappeared after the gunshot—his nose was red still and twisted and he was smiling too while someone talked to him, and he nodded, and I drank, and reality felt preposterous. Whatever loneliness that persisted inside of me rearrived.
It was warm; hot as hell and it made us thirsty.
They piled and slept like degenerates wherever and those that passed silently from injury, which were laid about, could not have been determined besides the living—surely the smell would’ve been something if I hadn’t the belching stench of whiskey on my breath. As the dinner died, I excused myself to the hall; I saw Mal laid-out. Jessica sat beside her, craned half over a raised mattress with the cup in front of her chest; she held onto the small object with white knuckles.
Looking over the mass of folks in the bunkroom while standing in the threshold, I shook my head and moved onto the next room and the scene was much the same. That loneliness remained and I felt like maybe I’d done it, I’d put it there in me. As often as I harkened back to the days of the Rednecks, to the days of family, community, unity; a better man could have rebuilt that—absurd, could a person rebuild the abstract? No. Maybe not rebuild. That’s the wrong word. It is remend? New ties. New lives and a new community.
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There was one person I wished was there: Suzanne. I sat in the hall by the latched door, closed my eyes, tilted my head back and listened to the ruckus overhead (it was almost silent) and I squinted through slits at the overhead lights and in reaching a hand to the open air by my side, open palmed, I almost felt Suzanne’s hand in my own and for a while it felt totally real. Smiling childishly, I blinked a few times, sat the bottle between my legs where I was, massaged my eyes.
Though I half-listened for banging on the door, no one came. Whoever was left overhead was gone. That was another happiness. Maron—Billy was surely dead, and I could rest easier for it. It should have been an end to the terribleness in me; the crying came on like a hard ache that went all over my body and no weight came off me. That was why I cried so heavily there in the hall; there was always the expectation that there would be a weight gone and it wasn’t—I should’ve known better than that and it had been something I feared all along. It made no difference. He was dead and I was alive and none of it mattered anyway. What grand satisfaction!
My face went into my hands, and I was overcome with a wild thumping all over; my heartbeat banged around, and I smeared my eyes with the backs of my hands and in doing so I smeared the dried blood there. I examined myself and saw my hands were covered in the stuff (some was my own, but mostly it wasn’t), my shirt was splattered with it, and even the dark jacket I wore showed it. It didn’t matter. There was no matter. The level of idiocy—I was no better than all those folks that disappeared from their mourning with their drink and their food and their conversations. The only difference was that I was entirely alone—whose fault was that anyway? I knew and I cried some more.
In the time I sat in the hall, the drink bottomed out and consciousness came and went deliriously. My left leg ached, and I stretched it out and pulled my jacket tightly around myself and slept about as pleasantly as a person could.
Jackson spoke briefly about these underground places. It’d been a drunk night in the company where they kept pouring him another and another. He never did go on so much as that night about the underground. Jackson said all of them had COI markings. It was some old men that’d built them. Ancient bygone times. I wished I’d asked him more.
When I came awake again, there was no indicator—all time was the same under those lights; they no longer flickered. The thing that brought me from my slump was the boy from before. The young one that’d asked me to save his daddy. He’d pushed into my bicep and held on to my forearm with his one good hand like it meant he might die otherwise. Startled, I looked on the boy; his eyes were changing—the process was slow but evident. Had he been in the hall all along? Had he seen me there crying? I hadn’t even noticed him. I scanned the chamber and there were still a few bodies strewn about: forgotten or unknown. The boy’s father remained erect where he was sitting, rod still protruding from the corpse.
“What’s the matter?” I asked the boy.
“He’s cold.” The boy coughed on the words, and I shuddered; his eyes were a streak of red with two whiting orbs and he pinched them shut and slammed his face into my arm.
I nodded, sighed, “You got a mama?”
He kept his head the way it was and didn’t react to my question at all.
“What’s your name, boy?”
His voice was a muffle in my arm and indiscernible.
I nudged him a bit but hoped to not disturb him too much. His small fingers on his right hand were like little pincers, and they dug into me. “You got a name?”
His head moved gently up and down and then he finally freed himself from where he’d buried into my arm. “I’m William.”
“William? Huh. Funny name.”
William snorted and pulled away and straightened himself and wiped his cheek with his shoulder and kept his good right arm clinging on mine—his rotting hand stank but I said nothing. “I’m named after daddy.”
“Mm.” I nodded and craned my head back to rest on the wall we sat against. “Anyone ever call you Billy?”
“No.” The child sniffled, lifted his head a bit so his chin stuck out, “Are you like one of those monsters?”
I shot him a curious expression.
“You’re all messed up on one side.”
I faintly grinned and shook my head. “C’mere,” I lifted my arm so that he may lean into my ribs and with him doing so, I wrapped both arms around him; his little body shook but he didn’t make too much noise. William’s hair smelled like sweat and dirt and I let him cry for a while, cupping his crown in my hand, resting my chin across my knuckles, staring at the wall across.
A day and some passed in the underground. We moved the corpses into the large room where the ammunition manufacturing was done; the webbing cracks with traced the walls there seemed deeper, more impressive—that might’ve only been my imagination. Once the dead were taken care of, covered, given rites completely where pertinent, a subtle equilibrium overcame us survivors; it was no such thing as normal—who knew what that was?
Folks burst into sudden fits of anger or joy or passion or vigor or lust or deep sorrow; mourning manifested in whatever fashion it so decided. Though it was obvious, it was not always evident to everyone and so fights broke out intermittently, but two people could fight and within an hour’s time they’d be best friends and so the cycle would repeat. Mal toured me through the place some so that I gathered the layout somewhat. There were food stores aplenty, though something drug on the reserves of water. The stuff fresh from the pipes would disappear shortly—the faucets spit angrily from disrupted pressure. Whatever was bottled or preserved would not last infinitely; we would all need to face the surface.
I intended on this sooner rather than later regardless of how anyone felt about it.
The boy—William—kept to my heels no matter how I distanced, and I gave up quickly on losing him amongst the crowd.
Golgotha, being as large as it was, was densely packed and although I never counted the heads of those I passed (I’m sure Boss Frank did so), the ones that were left were a sad few; only a bit more than one-hundred-and-fifty by a guess. That was what remained. How sad. I wished to dive into the theatrics, the dramatics of it. I wished to bring myself to ruin over the lost lives—yet there was some rotten core in me that believed it was deserved. Oppressed existed only because they allowed it. What should I have felt? I felt nothing too much.
There was the hope of Suzanne—I’d cook for Suzanne and Gemma both and maybe I’d find a stick for Trouble, and I’d never feel misery again; this was a dream, I knew it then too. Misery was me and whether it was so by Mephisto or I put it there was irrelevant.
Hope, love, companionship. Words I wished I knew better. There was a light too though. It grew in me. Maron was dead. Billy was dead. I was glad for it—gladder than I’d been. The weight remained but I was out of excuses.
I pilfered clothes, medicine, a satchel, foodstuffs, and hoped to go away quickly, abruptly as oft before, I went to the latched door which led outside. The smell of brimstone remained, the smell of smoke too, but I wished for daylight and grew more restless.
In the wet basement there was dust and rubble and ascending the stairway to the kitchen of that place once known as the hall of Bosses, I smelled something like rain. It was only earlier than midday by a smidge and I propelled myself from the place, down the front steps of the hall, into the awful state of Golgotha.
The sky was red, and the walls were streaked with brown dried blood and the bodies—pieces and flayed—were putrid in the sun like putty dolls. Smoldering black spots swelted heat at random checkpoints and warped or torn metal glowed as silver where they threw the sun like blinding orbs. Water spurted from pipes which fed the hydro towers most of all and the ground ran muddy and scabs of congealed viscera the size of paper sheets rafted along in puddles that culminated in places where I walked.
I moved through the streets that were no longer and peered across and in my beleaguered visage I saw the exterior walls, the thick bulwark against the wastes, had been punched through in places. Leviathan again.
Buildings—pieces—tilted in on themselves and out on neighbors and rooves fell away in slants so that I clamored across them precariously with wide legs.
Hell stink remained wherever I moved and bodies stood in places—those with faces remained upturned to the sky, eyes gone or tongue gone or ears and I felt compelled to face them away.
Strangers called out to me, and I slid where I walked to pivot where I’d come from, and I saw that a good many survivors followed me from the recesses of the underground; they called to me, but I waved them off and shifted to look for a good enough path from that devastation. Those specks of people—that’s what they’d become there on the steps of the hall—had no weight I should carry.
A rattle of strangulation signaled someone ahead and in the harsh sunlight they were painted black like shadow till my eyes came to focus completely on them. They wore a cowboy hat and swore some indistinguishable thing loud enough to wake the dead.
“No,” I said.