Archive for the ‘Luc Reid’ Category
Aftermarket
Thursday, September 2nd, 2010
By the time the sky began to lighten to gray, Abbie had finished painting a pentagram that encompassed the entire interior of her car. She had painted through the night using clear nail polish, a miniature flashlight gripped between her teeth.
When she crawled out the door and straightened up, finally stretching her cramped back muscles, it felt like someone was prying her apart with a crowbar. Abbie’s eyes watered, but she kept her groan fairly quiet.
Compared to gathering the ingredients for the invocation and painting the pentagram, the actual process of calling the demon was anticlimactic and easy. The object of the summoning was just a weak little Dolor Culi (a name that she was told translated roughly to “pain in the ass”). Abbie reached into the back seat of the car, set the materials on fire on top of an old cookie sheet, stepped away, and recited the Latin she’d memorized.
The car filled with a dull green smoke, which stank like a burning outhouse. In the depths of the roiling cloud, two bulging red eyes peered out balefully, though as the smoke dissipated they went invisible with the rest of the demon, just like the books said.
Abbie and her car stood in the driveway of a small, yellow house that badly needed repainting. Now she walked to the front door and knocked on it. She had to keep knocking for several minutes before Danny’s new girlfriend Britney–the one he’d been cheating with–opened up, squinting and wearing an oversized Pokemon t-shirt. Britney grimaced when she saw Abbie, but pulled the door open and walked toward the back of the house, shouting “Danny! It’s your ex.”
Danny emerged from the bedroom bleary-eyed, wearing only his beloved Soviet Russia boxer shorts. Abbie tossed him the keys. He grabbed for them belatedly, still befuddled by sleep, and missed. The keys hit the carpet with a muffled jangling sound.
“Hope you enjoy my car,” Abbie said.
Danny smiled. “I will enjoy my car,” he said.
“That I paid for.”
He shrugged theatrically. “Title’s in my name. Next time you should be smarter.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Abbie said, and left.
As she walked off toward the bus stop, she waved to the Dolor Culi. She had no way of telling whether or not it waved back.
The End, Five Months Later
Monday, August 30th, 2010
Every few weeks I checked the mail, because we didn’t use the shortwave, and who knows? There might be something some day.
And this time, there was something: a bible-sized envelope stuffed with pictures. George was in the garage, working on the backup generator, so I took them into the kitchen, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down to look them over.
They were just of people, with no explanations or labels except the date printed on each one. They were all recent pictures: everyone in them was still alive.
People in a walk-in freezer among hanging corpses of cows and pigs. People watching a movie. Half a dozen people having a dance in a ballroom the size of an airplane hangar. Someone waving from the cockpit of a twin-engine plane. People playing monopoly. People kissing. Children on a playground. A whole series of shots of people playing at a water park that apparently someone had started back up for the occasion.
Of the few tens of thousands of people left in the world, as far as I could tell, most wanted to join others and rebuild. George and I had kept to ourselves for years and years, and we liked our lonely house out at the end of a lonely road with our well water and George’s lonely job fixing cell phone towers. We hadn’t had neighbors or cable or an Internet connection before the End, so we didn’t miss them when they were gone: we just expanded my garden into a tiny vegetable farm, erected a small barn so we could start keeping goats, filled the basement with chest freezers, and hooked up two big generators that we powered from a gasoline delivery trucks we kept down the road at the turnaround, so we wouldn’t have to look at it every day.
George came in from the garage, looking grim and satisfied, and went straight to the refrigerator for a glass of lemonade. He noticed the photos as he was pouring.
“What’re those?” he said.
“People.”
“What do they want with us?”
I shrugged and pushed the photos toward him. “Everything, I guess. What do you think?”
He looked the top few photos over carefully, then flipped through the rest to see if they were the same kind of thing. Then he tossed the whole pile into the “to burn” garbage can. “We already have everything we need,” he said, and headed back out to the garage.
I went over to look at the tiny, flat faces shining on the glossy photo paper atop the “to burn” pile. For a long moment I scanned their faces, looking for reasons, for why this all happened, for any reason we had to all come together now that it was over, even if we didn’t want to.
I didn’t pick the pictures back up. Instead I turned and went back out into the corn patch to weed. Half an hour later, I think I’d forgotten about the pictures completely.