Offal
Better off
“If you found her, even if you did. She wouldn’t want to be found by you.”
Garrett speaks the words out loud, slow, and steady. He follows the outburst by walking into the septic restroom the ancient jury-rigged so many years ago and looks at his hazy reflection in the mirror.
There is a disfigured, ashy apparition staring back at him. The eyes are sunken, the flesh around them is blue black. Wiry chunks of curled black hair stick out in patches over a flakey scalp. The top of Garrett’s head looks like a length of old-world black top, complete with fractured crags and patches of unruly flora. The left side of his head, once swollen up and red like a bloated rat carcass is now a grimy patchwork of poorly stitched skin and blue-black bruises.
“If I ever found you, I’d expect you to kill me. Places traded, it’s what I would do to you.”
Garrett says the words, watching his chapped lips move around the crooked apparatus of his mouth. Those sunken, half mast eyes, those miserable dark orbs look on without emotion or hope, not even the slightest speck of yearning or genuine mirth to be found within.
“Is there anyone in there? The electric lights are on, the radio buzzes its static, but is there anyone even in there? Anyone at all?”
Garrett sees his mouth moving, he feels his tongue scraping around the dry lake bed of his mouth, he hears the words punctuated and pronounced but he doesn’t feel anything at all.
The mirror in this bunker is polished metal, Garrett has seen this material in nearly every bunker, used for all mirrors and reflective surfaces. Glassmaking is so much older, tried, and true, so why did the makers of the bunkers decide to use polished metal instead?
It’s not a new consideration for Garrett, he first thought about the oddity of the use of said material during his time in the Tumor Queen’s bunker. There was a place he found before that back in the middle of the wastes south of false water, near where he found his first nature guide book and the bulk of the small gold bars he would later waste on one worthless cause after another.
Unlike the gaol in his village built almost wholly to house winter drunks for a few days, and even very unlike the proper gaols of the more settled places he had been since, that ruined place was incarceration on a mass scale and seemingly for profit. Later Garrett would come to realize he had stumbled across one of the massive jails used by those who drank it all up.
Everything in the tiny cells was metal, the basin sink, the toilet, the bed frame built into the side of the wall. The reality of the furnishings became obvious as Garrett discovered the true nature of the horrid penal colony tucked behind its thick walls and armed guard towers. Metal is hard to break, hard to manipulate and say, turn into other objects. The stuff was also durable and that meant a place were unwanted individuals could be housed well…indefinitely.
The bunkers of their end times were built with the same ultimate understanding. Those who drank it all up, were a people devoid of hope. They weren’t building bunkers in hope of repopulating the surface some distant day, they were building their tombs, as well as each other’s prisons. They just didn’t really notice it, at least not at first. They built their all-metal bathrooms and kitchens and accommodations in the understanding that the material would be sure to last longer, but well, let’s face it, bonus points if the rats can’t trash their surroundings when the cabin fever finally sets in.
Garrett punches the polished metal mirror all the same. It will hurt, and a lot, but nothing will break. Nothing does. He lashes out at his ghastly doppelganger in the polished mirror and shouts in well-earned agony. He does it a second time when the first punch doesn’t magically destroy the grim visage still looking back at him in the mirror, he follows that up by shifting his feet and lashing out with the other hand. A fourth irrational reaction and something just might give but it sure as shit won’t be the wall or the metal mirror.
“I ruin everyone and everything I touch.”