No Hero - part three

The sixteenth was special.

It was later I met him, a couple days later. I’d found a strip mall with a grocery store where the porch had collapsed, blocking the entrance. The rubble looked pretty heavy and all the windows I could see were intact, so I figured there’d be plenty of food and water left inside. I was really using my strength, really fully using it, lifting slabs of shattered concrete and shoving them aside, trying to make a path to the door.

That’s when he saw me.

I stopped when I realised I was being watched, stopped and stared back at him. I was waiting for fear, for him to freak out.

Instead he smiled at me. He smile was so big and wide and it was the first smile I’d seen in weeks.

He told me he had friends trapped in another store further along – they’d hidden in the store room when the shaking started, and the room had been strong enough to withstand it but the rest of the store hadn’t. The door was blocked and he’d been trying and failing to find ways to move the blocks to get them out.

Then he found me.

I thought about leaving, about walking away. But that smile.

I was helping him before I’d even really thought about it.

His friends were lucky – they’d been trapped in a supply closet, plenty of food and cartons of juice, and the door opened outward enough for them to get some fresh air and for him to pass through fresh supplies.

The smell when I finally got them out – I don’t have the words for it. They’d done their best, using just one corner of the room, but they hadn’t exactly been lucky enough to be trapped with a bathroom.

They were all so grateful when I got them out – he was crying, tears clearing the grey dust off his face and revealing the smooth dark skin underneath. They were all crying. It felt so weird, standing there, watching these strangers cry and hug each other.

Later he said I should have a nickname, like Captain Hammer or Princess Powerful. He said I should have a cape.

I laughed, told him that was a stupid idea. I didn’t tell him how wrong that felt.

It was hard to shake them after that. The group kind of presumed I’d want to head out with them, and he was looking at me like I was something special, and I found myself travelling with them.

We kept heading east, or trying to – we all knew if we could get far enough away from the coast we’d begin to find towns that hadn’t been affected, ground that hadn’t been picked up and tossed out like a rug, tearing everything up and off and scattering it across the landscape.

It was hard to know the direction we were going in. All of the roads were in bad shape, some so torn up they were impassable, and some of the streets were blocked with fallen buildings, crashed cars.

On our third day together we found a lake.

We almost literally stumbled across it – it was midday, we were exhausted from the heat and the sun and the walking. I was just thinking if I had to listen to nothing but cicadas for one more damn minute I was going to lose it, and then we turned a corner and surprise. 

Lake.

We all just kind of stopped, and looked at each other, and looked at the lake, and then each other. I swear it was like a corny movie or something, this real touching moment for the heroes.

I don’t know who moved first but suddenly we were all running, running into the water, tearing off our clothes as we went, dropping our packs, not caring about who else might be around, who could try to steal our stuff. We sprinted naked into the water and flung ourselves in.

It was the cleanest, coldest thing I’d felt in months. All the grime was floating off us, off our skin, and I was struck by how different we all looked; under the grit of the road, hair lank with grease, we’d all looked the same, like grey ghosts of the people we used to be. In the water our colours came flooding back.

I found myself next to him, and he was smiling again – god, that smile. Water droplets were running off the tight black curls of his hair and he was smiling at me and I couldn’t help but smile back and then we were kissing.

Later, that night, we took each other’s hands and walked off, away from the rest of the group, to the privacy of the empty night. I climbed on top of him, took him into me, and watched him watching me. Still smiling. I loved that smile.

I rode him and watched his dark eyes cloud with lust. I rode him and wrapped my hands around his throat and watched the lust change to surprise change to fear change to panic. I squeezed, squeezed myself around him and watched the blood vessels bloom and burst in his eyes, watched until the whites were nothing but red and I cried out my satisfaction and release.

It was easy to just pack up and walk away from the others after that.

No Hero - part one

The first one felt like self-preservation.

I knew I couldn’t get her – so I didn’t try.

It was in all the safety information. “No heroics”. The ads literally said that. “No heroics. Don’t go back for people. Don’t wait. Run.” So I did. I heard the sirens sounding and I ran.

Later, I wondered about it. If I could have helped her. But nobody spoke about it, about how they survived, who they didn’t go back for, who they didn’t wait for.

So I stopped wondering.

The second didn’t seem to count. Those first few days, after it happened – it was all such a mess. We all did what we had to. I saw this guy, and the gang running after him, hunting him down, and I thought about stepping in. About being a hero.

But I was afraid. And I think it crossed my mind, somewhere deep down, that if I helped him I’d be responsible for him and he’d be another mouth to feed.

A burden.

So I left him.

The third I felt bad about. She was trapped, her legs crushed – this was three days after it happened, I was amazed she was still alive. Her legs had started to rot, I could smell them as I got close, rotten meat and rotten vegetables from all the produce turning to mulch around her.

I’d gone into the remains of a grocery store, trying to find food, maybe some bottled water. I found her in there. I wasn’t the first: the store had been nearly cleaned out of anything canned, bottled or boxed. The heat was intense – no air-conditioning obviously. What wasn’t rotting was drying out, sort of mummifying.

There were a few bottles of water next to her, some empty, some not; boxes of crackers; a few cans; a can-opener; a torch. I could see where someone had tried to make a lever and fulcrum, tried to lift the concrete beam off her and failed.

She was crying. She begged me for help. To release her.

I’m still not sure what kind of release she was asking for.

I left her. I felt bad for her – but I took the water, the cans, the tools, the torch.

I felt bad that I left her screaming.

The fourth was an accident.

We’d both stumbled across each other in what had been a motel. I wanted a place to crash, had faint hopes of a stocked vending machine, ice buckets full of clean melted water, the lottery-win-remote odds of enough water in the pipes for a shower.

She surprised me.

I thought I was alone, was letting down my guard, was scouting for what I could use. She popped up from behind a desk, popped up and out at me.

I remember she was small, smaller than me, maybe younger than me, maybe a kid.

I hit her before I knew what I was doing, I hit her before checking my strength, hit her with no holding back.

My fist connected with her face and her head whipped sideways and there was a crunch and she dropped like someone had flipped a switch.

On/off.

Alive/dead.

I checked her pockets, her bag. She had a gun, a pistol probably too big and heavy for her small hands to use. There were bullets, a pocket-knife, a half-empty pack of Oreos, a carton of milk so warm and swollen I didn’t even want to open it, a comic, a brownish apple.

I left the comic. Superheroes didn’t make me feel so good anymore.

I took her bag, packed up her stuff and mine. It was an accident, but I still needed to survive and she didn’t.

The fifth I barely remember.

What came before and after, it stands out pretty sharp in my memory. But the fifth, I guess it just felt kind of mundane. Trivial. He’d caught up with me on the highway, seemed like he’d been watching me for a while. Said he’d found that still-warm kid back at the motel, said he knew I’d understand, that I’d get why he had to take my stuff.

My stuff.

I don’t remember his face, his voice; it was twilight and we were alongside one of those huge rips in the ground, a fissure hundreds of feet long, totally black inside, like something had just grabbed the ground and torn it apart – which is pretty much what actually happened, I guess.

I remember he screamed as I shoved him in. I remember he screamed for a while and I was surprised, still able to be surprised, at how deep he fell and how long he screamed.

I don’t remember if I took his stuff first or not.

The sixth was vengeance. First for them, and then for me.

They were his friends, I think – they didn’t know exactly what had happened, but they knew something had happened and he’d been following me and then he wasn’t.

I’d been walking along that broken black tarmac when I heard them running after me, heard them shouting some guy’s name and then yelling at me as they got closer and could see my silhouette against the gloom of nightfall.

For those first few seconds I was scared, and I ran. Ran like I had when I heard those sirens and knew the wave was coming. Ran the way you do when your life depends on it – not just as a simile, but when you know your life literally depends on how quickly you can get to higher ground.

They caught up with me anyway.

They might have been older than me, were definitely taller than me, and I couldn’t sprint faster than they could.

I guess no surprises they survived the wave.

When they caught me they were all yelling over each other, grabbing my jacket, grabbing the girl’s backpack I’d taken, yelling their friend’s name, yelling at each other. I saw their hands clench into fists and there was a moment when I started to prepare myself to take a beating.

But then I lost it.

I’d never really let go before, never chosen to just completely, no-holds-barred, no pulling punches, no checking myself let go. It felt good.

They were so shocked at first that it took them a few slow seconds to start trying to fight back, trying to defend themselves. All I could hear were the wet, crunching, popping sounds whenever my fists made contact.

One guy, I hit him right below the eye and it was like his cheek disintegrated, his whole face just caved in and he dropped cold.

The others saw that and stopped trying to fight and started running instead.

I chased after them, but they were still too fast for me.

I went back to him, to my sixth. I was still so mad, so full of this lashing, burning rage. I kept pounding at his face until his head was just a smear on the pavement.

I felt better after that.