Rare Air
Part Thirteen
The smell.
You get used to it.
Coming from the outside, and the fresh cold air as they were, I imagine it was the best weapon I could have had if I had wanted one to use.
“Fuck me! Back out guys, I think someone died in here.”
The group of them, there must have been five or six, were mostly still outside and arguing among themselves about whether it was better to bed down with a corpse or freeze to death. The two inside with me were most certainly on the fence until I stirred from underneath the mountain of old, musty blankets that had been keeping me alive for the last few weeks.
One yelled and backed away, the other pulled a hatchet from his coat and raised it over his head. I hadn’t uttered any nonsense yet but I could feel the crazy bubbling just underneath the surface. The creaking door that had been so rudely pushed open was demanding an apology from these strangers. The damn door always complained about being used.
Jerry was in the corner where I had last thrown him, discarded under a few items of clothing so stiff I couldn’t wear them any longer. I could here him mumbling for me to run, to find the knife, where was the fucking knife? Jerry wanted me to kill them all. Maybe hang one outside as a warning to others.
Folks, Jerry was an old safety log that had refused to catch or burn. I carved a crude, pinched face on the damn thing and started calling it Jerry. I know the mayor called him by some other name, Doug I think, but the asshole back in Nothingsville always looked like a Jerry to me.
I didn’t want to listen to Jerry, I never did. I didn’t want to hurt them and to be honest, I didn’t care if they came to hurt me. I shuffled off of the cot and stood still as the man with the hatchet considered how much of a danger I was before taking my life.
Someone out on the porch aimed a flash light at me and gasped. Another one out there made a disgusted sound and exclaimed, “Fuck, let’s just go. If there’s one cabin, there’s probably another one somewhere close by.”
The one who was busy shining the light directly at me called out, “Kurt? From Burroughs camp?”
The beard, I already had it back then and maybe that was enough. Big, red, and bushy with those shitty strands of silver I used to try and pluck out. The one remaining bit of vanity I kept around after this toilet world hit the flush plunger.
I nodded but I couldn’t bring myself to speak, I was genuinely afraid of who might decide it was their turn. Would the creaky door tell them all to leave at once? Would Jerry calmly beckon them in with empty promises of shared splendors while he searched for the knife? Or would I simply blurt out in my idiot wail, “I’m sick. I have the plague…run for your fucking lives!”
As it turned out I never needed to say a thing. The one who called me by name shook the flashlight around and the others got a look at the interior of my disgusting kingdom and that was pretty much that.
“You know this…guy?”
“Yeah, from the Burroughs camp. He left before it fell. Let’s go guys, there’s nothing here.”
The one with the hatchet backed away and nearly upended a full pale of waste I had been meaning to dump in the morning. He gagged and turned and the other one followed behind him. None of them even bothered to pull the creaky door closed before they marched off with their boots crunching through the snow.
Crazy comes in the air, it settles in the folds and turns the skin sickly pale. I looked insane, I was and most certainly still am. Sick however, well, I never did cecum to that bout of type two I thought I had. I did however cecum to a serious bout of being rehomed.
Not that next day, or even the next night or day after that. Two full days later, after seeing that rag tag group of other late stage survivors I caught the last full measure of their neighborly nature and kind concern.
Again, I didn’t wake when their feet crunched through the snow. I didn’t wake when as they likely argued in whispered tones about where or how best to start the fire. I merely woke to inferno.