Kenneth Calhoun - Black Moon

EVEN the quieter streets at the edge of the city offered evidence of crisis. The total collapse of infrastructure could be quickly read in the chaos—urban order rearranged into a collage of artifacts. The looted stores lined the junk-strewn streets, dark and empty. Occasionally, a telling stench would rise from under a pile of litter and debris tossed from windows, and Biggs would glimpse a bloodless hand, a foot or clump of hair, entangled in the clutter. Bodies were turning up everywhere.

There were living people too, aimlessly roaming the streets mumbling to themselves. They displayed varying degrees of sleeplessness, with those newer to it still somewhat alert to the world around them, walking fairly straight lines. Biggs staggered his stride, blinking as he moved past them. Others were further gone, shouting and growling in the shadows like Carolyn during that last week, when he failed to cure her with his placebo. The memory of her raging against her bindings until the chair fell over. He leaned against a wall, looking very much like the afflicted around him, hand covering his face, shoulders quaking.

She wouldn’t want this. She had always said one of his great qualities was his reluctance to feel sorry for himself. It was the thing that had helped her endure her mother’s long, terrible death as a victim of cancer, then grieve. She claimed she saw herself through his eyes, which had little tolerance for self-pity and were somehow able to find illumination from the sparest light. She would not be that creature he saw in The Dream, propelled by self-pity into the blackish sea. Just as he, now, should not allow himself to be drawn into the void of her absence. After all, he could still sleep, still dream. Who knew what those dreams had yet to reveal?

He started moving again and made the effort to target earlier times in his memories of her. Stumbling along the street and recalling how she would rest her head on his chest at night—the vanilla smell of her skin and the pleasing weight of her leg thrown over his thighs. Her exotic, short-lived food obsessions: green apple sandwiches, then crab Rangoons, then Vietnamese subs. The erotic and funny shadow plays she produced with her hands, projected against the far wall by the flood of evening sunlight.

He noticed more people on the streets. Maybe, lost in his thoughts, he had ventured into the busy center of this particular neighborhood. He headed toward the nearest intersection with the intention of ducking the crowd and taking the quieter side streets, when he noted that everyone seemed to be shuffling along in the same direction, a trend. This was an odd sight.

Biggs was drawn into the current. He did not fight it. Maybe word was out that there was help of some kind being handed out somewhere down the street. He followed the flow of people, which came to a stop as a small, loose crowd in front of a shop of some kind. Empty cars clogged the street and people climbed over them or pushed around them, filling in the spaces between like soft mortar. The crowd prevented Biggs from seeing the entry and whatever activity that was taking place there. He could see from the signage that the establishment was not a store. It was, or had been, a strip club called Delicious. The windows were painted over and a cagelike iron grille had been pulled across the entire storefront. Biggs climbed up onto a car for a better view. He could see a couple of massive men standing in the dark entryway, on the other side of the gate, looming like bouncers. Could this be about sex? Biggs wondered.

“What’s going on?” he asked the man standing next to him on the hood of the car. The man turned, looking both dazed and puzzled. Biggs realized he had dropped his sleepless pose. He started to back away, then lost his footing and fell into the crowd. He hit the press of bodies backpack first, generating a chorus of complaints that was abruptly silenced by a loud clap of gunshot.

The sound hit Biggs like a slap. He righted himself, stunned. The crowd collectively ducked and, until they slowly rose back into place, Biggs could see through to the doorway where a small man with a pistol was now standing between the bouncers.

“Shut up and listen!” he heard the man shout. He had an Indian accent. The crowd quieted enough for Biggs to clearly hear his pitch. “You want to sleep, you step up with gold. Just gold. Don’t have gold? Go get some. Yank some hobo’s teeth, rob your church. I don’t give a fuck. Just get it. That’s the only thing that will get you through these doors and into a bed, where Mother Mary will have you sleeping like a motherfucking baby.”

The crowd reaction was mixed. Some surged forward, either in anger or in desperation, Biggs couldn’t tell. Others scattered. In the crush of bodies, he backed away, then turned and staggered down the street. He wasn’t sure what to make of the offer, but to think there might be other sleepers compelled him. It seemed like a volatile scene, though. And why at a strip club? Best just to keep moving. Besides, he didn’t have any gold, and he guessed that the gun-wielding bouncers at the door weren’t open to negotiation.

Biggs walked on, but the strange neighborhood had turned him around. An hour later, he realized he was heading back into the city. Backtracking, he knew he had walked a loop when he found himself in front of Delicious, where a small crowd was still gathered. Night was descending. Biggs, exhausted and frustrated at having made no progress, sat on a car across from the strip club and studied it. The barred storefront, the blackened windows, the dim windows on the second and third floors. He was scanning the building, searching for a way to sneak in, when he thought he saw Carolyn at a third floor window. There she was flashing by—hair pulled back, arms bare—glancing quickly down at the street, at the crowd.

At him?

He stood, his eyes darting over the dark façade. Could it really have been her? He had to get inside. He covered his mouth with his hand, as if suppressing a scream, and felt a metallic coolness against his lips.

His wedding ring.

JUST PAST ST. GEORGE, IN THE BASIN OF A valley walled with Irish-setter-colored stone, they were pulled over by a patrolman. The trooper sat in his dust-coated car for a prolonged moment before approaching, giving Chase ample time to turn pasty with fear. He grabbed at his own throat and squeezed. “We’re fucked,” Chase said. He began to hyperventilate.

Jordan kept his hands on the wheel and stiffly watched through the rearview mirror without turning his head.

“Just hold it together,” Jordan told him through clenched teeth, talking like a ventriloquist, as if to be seen conversing would somehow incriminate them. “It’s just about speeding. I think I was speeding.”

Chase turned in his seat to see the lawman approaching, edging along the driver’s side, one hand sliding along the top of the car. He could hear the squawks of static coming from the officer’s radio, a jangling. Keys, maybe. At the sight of the badge, the heavy gun belt and holstered pistol, Chase’s chest locked up, his throat clenched.

“I can’t breathe,” he said.

“Relax,” Jordan said calmly. “Don’t give him a reason.”

Now the trooper stood at the window, swaying slightly, waiting. Jordan turned and rolled down the window. “Hi,” he said cheerily. “Was I going too fast?”

Chase could not see the trooper’s face, only his khaki shirt straining against the swell of belly. The cop belt of weapons and restraints. The officer held out his hand. Chase heard him mumble, “You know the thing.”