MY SON, ZORAH

        My son, Zorah, isn’t my biological son--nor is he my child by law. It’s a good thing too, because I’ve been one hell of a parent so far. I know virtually nothing about him. I don’t know his favorite food, his comfort movie, or any allergies he may have. I don’t know if he has any siblings or where he used to live before DY-CON 15. I don’t know the names of his birth parents or what his favorite subject was when school was still around. The only thing I know is that if these were normal circumstances, the court would deem me unfit to raise an eleven-year old and kick me to the curb in a fleet of freshly-shined brogues.

But circumstances haven’t been normal in over a month. People have been dissipating into the atmosphere like steam on a January day--I feel like I’m living in a ghost town now. Sometimes I like it, but at night it’s downright creepy. Something straight out of a Stephen King thriller, I’d imagine. I’ve never read any Stephen King.

                                      Aliens, Whistleblowers, I Don’t Know What They Were

 The first disappearance was Addy, a skittish woman on the end of the block with translucent skin and sewn-up lips. She washed away in the middle of the night. Gone, just like that. And although it was frightening (for the people who cared), it wasn’t surprising; her body was as flimsy as printing paper and she only came out to retrieve the mail. Once, Sonny Norris saw her with a UPS package. Either way, Addy’s spectral form left her absence unnoticed until last Monday morning. A gaggle of persimmon-capped kids discovered an untouched stack of the Washington Post piled up at Addy’s front door during a round of Girl Scout peddling. Sadly, I could not escape their clutches.

“You want some cookies?” A rangy little girl with a mouse-like face greeted me as I opened the door. Her carrot-top friend shoved her box in my face, probably to lure me with aroma. “The Tagalongs half off this week, on account of some printing error. Something’s wrong with the box, but nothing’s wrong with the cookies.”
“Thanks, but no thanks.” I said wryly. “I don’t care for that processed junk.”

“Please.”

“No.” I stated firmly. “And you have some nerve, ringing on the bell like that. It must’ve sounded at least fifteen times. Half the people in this building are elderly. You probably woke them from their daily siesta.”

“With all due respect, we have a quota to meet.” The tubby redhead exclaimed. “And nobody’s been opening their doors all day. We need to sell thirty boxes by Thursday, and so far we’ve only sold five.”

“Maybe it’s because you’re annoying. Give me that.” I snatched up the Tagalongs and sniffed them warily. The girls’ smiles drooped to their ankles. “Here’s a life lesson: if someone doesn’t answer, and you can clearly tell they’re home, it’s likely because they’re uninterested.”

“But that’s the thing. Nobody’s home. The old woman down the street hasn’t been home for weeks, it looks like. Sacha almost tripped on her pile of newspapers coming up the stairs. Who even bothers with those things these days? They’re filled with nothing but doomsday drivel.”

The stick-bug child blushed faintly. A part of me wished she had tripped, for no particular reason. These girls were just doing their job, I knew, but I couldn’t shake the urge to blow a raspberry at them.

They teach children to be entrepreneurial pests so young these days.

After Addy Beaudin, the Calders came next. Corbin, the baleful cop who drank beer on the clock and adorned his walls with firearms never came around after his shift on Saturday. Carrie, his mistress-- who never asks questions and permanently stared at the floor-- just assumed he was home with his wife, Tara. After all, sometimes Corbin would go rogue for hours after planning a rendezvous and turn up later with Tara's lipstick on his cheek. Got caught up at home, he’d always say. At least, that’s what I heard from Carrie. Who knows if he actually said it.

But to her dismay, a barren and empty night evolved into an inchoate sunrise. And that sunrise swelled into a blazing summer day with tumbleweeds that whispered Corbin’s name. A week and a half later he still hasn’t come around.

“I’m afraid he’ll never come back.” Carrie mused wistfully. On Friday, she caught me on the way to deliver a letter at the postbox at the end of the block. It was a conversation I’d rather not have, but seeing as she was walking her hellish pomeranian in the same direction I was headed, I had no choice but to listen. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s me.” 

Shards of diamonds fell from Carrie’s eyes and went kerplunk on one of her stomach rolls. I was notoriously bad at consoling people, so I said: “Maybe. But I feel like he would’ve at least told you, considering he fucks you every time his wife’s not home. I wonder what it could be. Are you pregnant or something?”

Carrie scowled, and I dropped my bill into the mail slot. “It’s rude to ask a lady that, don’t you know? How would you feel if I asked the same? Ten to one I bet you’d be offended.”

“Sorry.” I glanced down at my stick-thin frame, knowing no one would ever mistake me for a pregnant woman. I at least had enough common sense to keep that to myself.

“I hope they’re not hiding in a bunker or something. What if he ran off with that dimwit Tara and left me here to die? So many people are buying underground shelters these days.”

“Well, I certainly don’t have one. There may never even be a bomb.”

“How could he leave me hanging? I just can’t take it. When will this end?” Carrie cried.

“I don’t know.” I said back.

We walked back in silence, spare the irascible yapping of her puppy. Little did we know that this would only be the start of things. 

                                                              Trip To The Old Fogies' Home

Before the DY-CON bombing, news reporters warned scientists against the dangers of a nuclear bomb. The ghosts of Hiroshima victims wept in the wake of a behemoth far more deadly and radioactive than anything they could’ve imagined. Evolve and revolve--that was their motto-- and one-hundred years provided more than enough time to do so. Before global news went defunct, broadcasters from every station warned of impending doom. Like ravens, they were harbingers of death: eyes red like the Nile and draped in onyx tweed to prepare for a predetermined funeral. Sleep for the masses, my mother used to say. If she’s still out there somewhere then perhaps she’s still saying it, but her phone line is dead and her house is boarded up.

Before I met Zorah, I took the thirty-mile trek up to WaKeeney to pay a visit to my folks. In retrospect it was a wellness check, but I was too clouded in a foggy swarm of dread to recognize the truth. Call me crazy, but I didn't want to consider the prospect of nuclear warfare if I didn’t have to. I’m usually good at avoiding the news (why get upset over stuff you can’t control?) but Carrie’s frantic ranting and that comment from the girl scout made it too stark to ignore.

I remember walking through the door, whose hinges were crying out in agony, and finding a Giza pyramid of canned food stacked on the dining room table. My parents had become incredibly emaciated since I last saw them. My ma’s cable-knit sweater hung off her like a second skin, shrouding her nonexistent frame in bundles of hand-stitched swirls, and my pop was on the last notch of his belt. He’d either cut back on the Coors or stopped eating entirely, but both seemed equally plausible. He locked me in a bear-hug on sight.

“So nice of you to drop by.” Pops exclaimed. “We’ve been trying to get you out for months. We’ve been calling and calling, but you never pick up. To be honest, we thought we may never see you again if all this mumbo-jumbo on the news is true.”

“Well,” I lied. “It’s my day off, and I realized it’s been a while. I had some time to kill.”

“No better way to kill it than here.” His skeleton recoiled and cracked in a thousand places. “Want to watch the game? They canceled everything in America, but Spain is hosting a match right now. I wouldn’t mind watching soccer for a change.”

“Fútbol.” I corrected. “They call it fútbol over there.”

So we watched the soccer game--or football game--or whatever you want to call it. And after we were done, I catered the fattiest and greasiest food I could find to put some meat on my parents’ bones. But it did nothing to help. They refused to turn the television off over dinner and subsequently stewed over Doomsday warnings from every channel their cable bundle came with. Twenty minutes later I was stuffed to the seams with oily chicken skin and white meat pumped with steroids but my ma and pop’s plates were untouched. Their mashed potatoes were swirled into Rorschach blotches and their coleslaw was still piled high. I sighed, packed up some leftovers, and thanked them for having me over. Which made no sense, considering I dropped by unannounced.

And then Zorah arrived. Or more accurately, the bomb arrived first, which eventually led to my son and I crossing paths. I used to scoff at the notion of the fate of the world metaphorized by a slew of falling dominos, each one cascading into the next black, rotten teeth. But the more I reflect on this past week’s events, the more I find myself drawn to the idea. Humans, so timorous in the face of their massive egos, seem to believe they’re unkillable. But they’re not. In fact, they’re actually far from it.

    

                                                How It Started, Plus My Mental Spiral

A person is an infinitely complicated web of thoughts and feelings and credos, and the idea that you can snub all of that by pulling a trigger or holding a pillow over someone's face is absolutely surreal. The idea that you can remove knowledge and emotion and memory from the world with a physical object is literally unbelievable. In this case, people are being killed by the hand of someone else-- the finger of the Russian leader who pressed the RELEASE BOMB button. So many people cannot comprehend the fact that you can terminate the endlessly complex being inside them by killing the vessel that holds them together, and that is where the hubris comes from.

But it really is that simple. Doctor Marten Kuznetsov woke up on August twenty-first and annihilated millions of neural connections. It may even be billions--I’m not exactly sure. All television signals went out two hours after DY-CON went off, so I know as much as the next guy. I spent the afternoon trying to recover from one of the worst hangovers of my life. I woke up in my apartment--which felt more like an oubliette with its exposed brick and perpetually musty smell--with a napkin glued to my face via hardened saliva. It was two o’clock. Empty beer cans peppered the hardwood like revolver shells and the tiny cherub statue I picked up at a yard sale had been vandalized. His tiny penis that was designed to spurt water (but temporarily spurted beer for last night’s party) had been knocked off by some mysterious blunt object. I had no idea who’d done it, and even less of an idea about what to do with the thing. Turning the cherub into a hermaphrodite made him absolutely useless and visually uncouth.

Getting back to Zorah-- I bent my T.V. antennae back into shape and caught the tail end of a rather abysmal news report from the sexy anchor on channel twelve. His name was Tom Clayton and had a jawline sharper than a fencing blade. I was usually fixated on his mouth when he spoke-- drowning out the local tragedies in favor of drowning in the velvety cadence of his voice-- but the massive bomb in the corner of the screen was too big to be ignored. It was unapologetically cumbersome, unabashedly evil. It obliterated Texas, burnt Mexico to a crisp, and singed the tips of Alaska’s islands.

I immediately called my parents, to no avail. They’ve been asking me to call them for months, and the one time I do it I get no response. I then slapped myself across the face to make sure I wasn’t stuck in some hyper-vivid vodka nightmare. Sadly, the pain of my slap stung hard. I was living in a miasma not even Stephen King could fathom.

I spent the rest of the morning staring at the wall phone. Some way or another I convinced myself that the tiny, plastic, candy-shell device was connected to some undisclosed locus of knowledge--despite the fact that a phone was only useful if you knew who to call. And myself, not having any friends to ring up to chat about the incipient apocalypse with, couldn’t dial a single number. After running a trench into my living room carpet from uninterrupted pacing (due to the stark realization of my hermetic lifestyle), I decided to take a breath of fresh air. I threw on some sneakers and headed outside.

Nothing in the immediate vicinity was decimated, but smoke billowed in the distance-- the sooty exhalation of a mountain of debris. The confounding juxtaposition of verdant trees lining the sidewalk with the barren tangles of dead branches ahead was enough to make my head throb. It was making my brain work too hard, on top of coping with a hangover. Mounds of detritus and ashy piles of ruin should not be visible from my utopian slice of suburbia, yet here we are. Who was it that said nothing was impossible? It sounds indulgent, idealistic--probably a scientist or something of the like.

“Hello?” I called, cupping my mouth to my hands. Although I felt utterly foolish shouting into the street, it felt like the logical thing to do. I could no longer operate under the assumption that things were still business as usual. Old Man Marv wasn’t rocking on his back porch or Shirley wasn’t weeding her garden.

“Hellloooooo?” I tried again. You get attuned to the habits of the elderly once you’re around them long enough; Shirley, Marv, and a handful of others settled into rather garish homes around the block, and valued the sanctity of routine. Without a job or kids to raise, I suppose they found a purpose in waking up with a schedule to adhere to. Otherwise they’d melt into a congealed bundle of sagging skin and varicose veins and pass away in the night. But none of them were answering now, and no one was home to hear me. I was speaking to God, the old bastard, shouting up into invisible stars.

And that’s when I heard shuffling. And then a wail. And a little boy stumbled out from the bushes. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had just beckoned my son-to-be, Zorah.

                                    A Strange Little Man…Whom I Can Hardly Call A Boy    

“Who are you?” He asked.

“Nobody.” I replied. And then: “Who are you?”
Zorah opened his mouth and closed it, making a notable pause. His shrewd, slate-colored eyes were like shaken up snow globes, frosted fire raging inside. “Nobody.” He finally said. “My name is also nobody.”

“That’s not how this works. You can’t be nobody if I’m nobody, too.”

“Well then one of us has to be somebody.”

“But I don’t wanna be somebody.”

“Well then neither do I.”

As if my morning couldn’t get stranger, I found myself having a stand-off with an eleven-year-old. He knitted his brows into sweeping arches--pulling the skin of his forehead into premature wrinkles--and contorted his ocean-wave lips into a scowl. It looked like Zorah was half child, half old man. If circumstances weren’t so dire, I would’ve laughed at his attempt to be foreboding.

“I’m older than you. I make the decisions. I can decide who’s nobody.”
“Not true--age doesn’t always signify intellectual superiority. I’ve met a lot of adults that are dumber than me.”

“Oh yeah? And how old are you?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“Not right now.” Zorah pontificated. “Look around you--the Earth is literally burning! This is what the Mayans predicted--except they were off by about twenty years. A bunch of freaking destruction and you’re worried about not sharing your name!?”

The faintest hint of adolescence shone through Zorah’s lilt. His voice, which was abnormally deep for someone his age, strained with the pitch of his wailing.

“That’s it, kid. No more games. I want to know who you are. Now. This isn’t exactly New York city where there’s too many people to bother learning who your neighbors are. I’ve lived here for three years, and I know everyone within a ten-mile radius (this was a slight hyperbole, but what the boy didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him). And guess what? I’ve never seen your face before. End of the world or not, I want to know who I’m dealing with.”

“Fine.” He huffed, crossing his arms defiantly. “My name’s Zorah. And I’m eleven.”

“Is that your real name?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He retorted. “Unless you hear otherwise--which you certainly won’t considering everyone’s sick, dead, or hiding in a bunker. You have nothing else to call me but the name I’ve provided.”

“Cocky bastard.” I muttered under my breath. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“Dodge City.” He replied.“Isn’t that ironic? I had to get out of Dodge.”

“Are you lying?”

“Maybe. But I still had to get out.”

“Why?”

“Too close to the impact sight. My parents packed an overnight bag and drove me north all morning. I slept in the car for most of it, so I don’t really know where I am.”

“Where are your parents? Why aren’t they with you?”

“They’re dead.” Zorah stated, rather matter-of-factly. “They died around noon from radiation poisoning. I left them in some bushes and tried to drive my dad’s pickup, but I don’t know how to steer and the pedals are too far away. Not only that, but I can hardly see over the dashboard. I’ve been ambling around for hours.”

“Sorry to hear that. About your parents, I mean.”

“It’s okay.” Zorah waved it off, almost dismissively--like he was referring to a pet fish that got flushed down the toilet. He then cocked his head sideways. A blizzard was brewing in his eyes. “Where are we?”

“You're in Ransom.” I said. “Ransom, Kansas.” I gestured to the houses behind me as if I constructed them all myself. “Home of the…well… I don’t think we have a town motto.”

“Care to show me around?”

“Sure,” I said, and hesitantly took his hand. We shuffled down the hot asphalt, two vagrant figures haunting the road. With no living soul left in sight, age no longer existed, and Zorah was simply my friend. He would perhaps be my only friend for the rest of my life.

I pointed out various buildings--all of them now probably defunct-- while the sun beat down on us crudely. It was as if the world was taking a liking to the solitude, this newfound sense of tranquility, and was trying to snuff out survivors.

“And here’s the old pharmacy. I was there just a week ago, but I’m going to call everything ‘old’ now. I hope that’s okay. I don’t think they’ll ever come back.”

“Who? The people who worked there?”

“Everyone. I don’t think we’ll ever escape this. Another bomb will probably drop, and

next time we won’t get so lucky. I think it’s just a matter of time. Look--even the birds are dying.”

There, about a foot ahead, a pigeon lay twisted into a pretzel shape, wings mangled in pain. Its whole body was twitching, either clinging to life or fitfully letting it go, and I couldn’t stop thinking: HARBINGER. This was a harbinger for us, and a morbid one at that.

“Gross. Put it out of its misery.”

“I can’t.”

“Then I’ll do it myself.”

In one swift motion, Zorah brought his foot down on the poisoned bird’s skull. A sickening squelch followed by a wispy caw came from underneath his heel. He kicked it to the side and moved on.

 The heat was stratifying, unbearable at this point. We’d been trekking for less than an hour but I was starting to slur my words like a drunkard. My brain felt like a wad of used chewing gum. But if I died like this, I supposed, I guess I would be happy. Unlike that masticated bird, Zorah and I would perish with purpose; we wouldn’t fall victim to the unchecked violence of the infallible human mind. Instead, the elements would take us out--heat, snow, wind--something that’s claimed the souls of thousands before us. If we walked into the field, perhaps we’d die like cavemen, dripping down into waxen nubs like human candelabras. We’d turn to a congealed mess of boiled guts on the grass, and disintegrate into the soil. If we survived until winter, we’d become frozen statues, our faces and bodies immortalized by a thick layer of ice.

We’d be a reminder of what roamed the earth before the DY-CON bombing.