The Bitter End

[Story contains themes of suicide, substance abuse and gore]

The mechanical zip and clink of a common grackle rang in with the breeze, filling the room with a now foreign airiness. Something that Adelaide took for granted the first sixteen years of her life. She was pretty sure she was nineteen now, but it didn't really matter.

“Mama said the outside air is evil." Winnie said, sleep still heavy on her tongue.

“Mama is functioning on three marbles.” Adelaide left the window open as she made her way to the bunk bed, “Can you keep a secret?" She crossed her arms, resting her head on them next to Winnie’s pillow.

"Yes!” Winnie covered her giggling mouth, her green eyes turning to saucers. She knew that Adelaide always had the best secrets, especially when their parents were out on ‘excursion’.

"Okay great. Because I've been saving this for a while.” Adelaide pulled an earbud out from her shirt pocket and brushed her fingers through Winnie’s dishy blond hair to expose her ear.

The tape exhaled under the twinkling celesta:

Sunday morning and I'm falling…

and I’m falling…

a nd I’ m fa ll in g …

Adelaide gasped, choking on the dryness at the back of her throat. Her body twinged like a washed up fish until she fully caught her breath. She peeled her stinging arm from the white metal under her, rummaging through her pockets for her flask as the reality of Mama’s betrayal came back to her. Could she even chalk it up to betrayal if it was deserved after all?

But Mama never liked her. At least not since she became truly sentient in her eighth year. Coincidentally, this was the year Winnie was born. She never blamed the little girl, and in the last three years as Winnie grew into her own stunted sentience, they had grown quite close.

“Bitch!" Adelaide screamed into the white hot void as she sat up and assessed her situation.

Mmeuuhhhhh—rrrrhhhrrh—biitc hh—

The brain dead rattled below her. By the grace of some sadistic deity she had landed from the bridge onto a box truck. Thankfully, they were all common K-SIM-IV types and the height of the truck played to her advantage. An especially tall K-SIM was able to pad his blistering, twitching fingers on the top of the box truck but he was either too emaciated or too braindead to pull himself up to consume her. She took another swig from the flask.

Intrusively, she recalled a deep fried image a classmate had shown her before the lockdown; When you're joking about Simian-Derived Kuru and fine shyt gives you this look—An overexposed image of an all American cheeseburger under the text.

She laughed. It was so stupid. Even now she couldn't believe this was reality. She pulled her knees to her chest as her laughter turned to tears. There was no way she was getting out of this mess. The K-SIMs filled between the vehicles like ants gathering around drops of honey.

If life were anything like her abilities in It Takes Two—A game she played with her dad years before the virus even touched the apes—Then there was about a thirty percent chance she could successfully platform maneuver the car tops and not get grabbed or fall into the decrepit orgy below. But it wasn't a chance she was willing to take. And without Winnie and Dad or even Mama, what was the point?

Adelaide did not believe in heaven or reincarnation. But, perhaps this was hell—She could buy into that. Fumbling with her cargo pockets, she retired her flask, saving the last half of liquid courage for later. She unfolded a piece of paper she always carried on her and hugged it close to her chest. If she could will herself to dream of Winnie just one more time, then she could reconcile the gun to her temple.

“Why can’t I come with you?” Winnie tugged at her sister's flanneled sleeve before she reached the door.

Adelaide furrowed her brow, studying Winnie's face that sank where baby fat should still exist—How could her eyes remain so youthfully eager? When she was eleven Adelaide's eyes were just as jaded as they were now and she was not even confined to seven hundred square feet of silence with nothing to look forward to but a can of potted meat once every fourteen days.

“Two rules okay?” Adelaide sighed, “And I'm dead fucking serious Winnie." She squeezed the girls shoulders, “You can’t second guess anything I tell you to do. If I tell you to hop on one foot in a circle you just do it, okay?" The girl's eyebrows twinged upward as she nodded and Adelaide slighted her grip. “Right. So then rule number two—If anything happens to me you have to run. Nothing's going to happen to me. But promise me you'll run home and never look back."

The sun spotted Adelaide’s eyesight and she could only make out a black shadow figure slinking toward her. A chill sliced through her core, propelling her backwards as she reached for her pistol. She felt a pull on her scalp and hot foam hit the back of her throat as she realized the twinge stemmed from rotted fingers snagged in her hair.

The stranger ripped Adelaide from the K-SIM by the ankle. Adelaide lowered her gun as she assessed the stranger's face. Her cheeks, contoured by plummy black tresses, rounded to a perfectly pointed chin. If it were not for her nearly vellum like flesh it would seem that somehow the widespread famine had missed her.

“Goddamn. That was close.” She lowered her wayfarers to reveal the blackest eyes Adelaide had ever seen. But it had been a while since she saw eyes that were not from her hazeled household. It only took a few hours for blood to glaze the eye of the common K-SIM, which always reminded her of cherry glaze on spoiled cream. The strange woman’s eyes were large and cut delicately toward the point of her chin, a slice of white bobbed between her pupil and lower lash line.

“Why did you jump down here? It's a death sentence.” Adelaide shook her head in disbelief of the woman's misguided bravery. Perhaps she was on a mission from the fabled new world Adelaide had heard her parents whisper about.

“I could ask the same. But we’re running out of time.” The stranger fixed her sunnies back in place and pointed her manicured finger at the sun strobing over the bridge.

“Who are you?" Adelaide ignored her urgency, stumped by the jarring elegance of the stranger. From her black nails to her wide legged culottes that split at the thigh she was utterly impractical and even if they were not years into the collapse it was hard to believe she would have fit in the hill country to begin with.

"Julia. You?” The stranger stood from her crouching stance and offered a hand to Adelaide.

"Adelaide." She waved Julia's hand away.

“Look, I’m golden.” Julia tapped her chest with her finger, “But once the dusk sets in, you’re not going to be able to navigate under the canopy and I hate being slowed down.” She threw her thumb up behind her shoulder toward the wooded embankment.

“And how exactly would we even reach that shit?” Adelaide exhaled a sharp laugh and threw her hands in the air, begging Julia to take a look around.

“Hop it?” Julia tweaked her head to the side as if it were completely obvious and feasible. Adelaide admired her coolness and decided to humor the absurdity. She figured if things went south she would have enough time to follow through with her funereal plan. A plan which she intended to carry through with anyways, but it had been so long since she had met someone new that she selfishly desired to bask herself in as much of Julia's assured nature as her conscience would allow.

“Won’t we topple over?” Adelaide questioned Julia's suggestion that she sit atop her shoulders.

"Goddamn with the questions!” Julia crouched with a swiftness as she hoisted Adelaide over her shoulder by the thighs. The girl had no time to acknowledge the foreign touch before Julia sprang from the box truck to a sedan. Adelaide screamed as the brain dead moving below them turned into a smear of bruised ochre and sanguinary teratomas as Julia ricocheted from one auto top to another.

A large twig twisted into Adelaide's back, snapping against her as she landed on the leafy hearth. She rifled for the comfort of her flask before catching breath. They had successfully slid from the top of a reefer truck that had careened at forty-five degrees into the embankment. Relief coaxed a laugh out of her as she turned over, slapping Julia’s arm with praise, "How the fuck did you—Are you like… Special Ops?”

"Nope.” Julia turned on her side, resting her head on her palm, "A lifetime of solitude can birth extraordinary outcomes." She shed her glasses and tucked them into the neckline of her blouse. Her dark eyes analyzed Adelaide’s face at three points, lingering toward the lower portion of her face. She patted the girl's hand and rose to her feet, “We have about fifteen minutes before nightfall. There are maintenance steps to the bridge not too far off."

They walked in relative silence through the thicket and sure enough the sky had reached its violet climax once they traversed the steps to bridge level. An earnest tweak of the lip snuck up on Adelaide as she peered down at the box truck that imprisoned her just half an hour earlier.

"My place isn't too far from here.” Julia explained that she lived atop The Curio Stop. A roadside attraction from the old world, of which she prepared specimens in exchange for free boarding, and so the fetid reality they found themselves in did not unease her.

“How do you deal with looters?" Adelaide recalled her excursions and a bleak wire tangled in her chest.

“Oh, I love company." Julia’s natural pout spread into a slice of warmth as she slipped her soft hand into Adelaide's with no protest.

"Jesus,” Adelaide gasped as Julia lit the final candle.

“Zoltar, actually." Julia knocked on his glass tomb. The all knowing fortune teller was ruddy and dessicated where he would typically be paraffin smooth. His brown eyes bore through the layers of organic blue film and plasticine lacquer, pleading desperately at Adelaide—For what? She had to look away.

“It’s terribly imperialist but I took some inspiration from the mummy paints of the eighteen hundreds." Julia continued. The candlelight emphasized not only the repulsive shapes around them but bathed her in a soft sensual hue.

"Do you have anything strong to drink?” Adelaide cleared her throat. A dull ache met her temples as she tried to make sense of the sudden onslaught of pins and needles taking space in her stomach.

Julia obliged her, clinking through a kitchenette that only partially obscured an age-worn staircase, which presumably led to the living quarters. The Curio Stop itself catered to what must have been a tea room at one point in time. Adelaide found it amusing that people had at one point reveled in drinking with the dead hanging over them—Literally! Cruciformed from the rafters, hung a life sized Fijian Wonder, violet ochre fading in and out over its tawny flesh.

The gruesome nature of its unzipped humanity seemed to be at war with the iridescent glint of its tail. It nearly distracted her completely from Julia. But the sharp pop of a cork welcomed Adelaide's eyes back to the kitchenette. Her gaze lingered upon the silhouette of Julia's curves. Perhaps, if the synthetic horrors around them had not kept her anxious eyes wandering about, she would have missed the unmistakable ridged arch festering atop the house mistress’s left ankle.

“Seriously? You're going to ruin our night?” Julia downed her glass of red, still holding Adelaide's in her other hand.

“You probably have less than an hour. I'm doing you a courtesy—I would hope you'd do the same for me!” Adelaide’s jaw tucked into her dominant shoulder, her hands firm as Julia’s face blurred behind the front sight. She knew things were turning out too generous for her.

“The same courtesy you extended to Winnie?" Julia cocked her eyebrow, throwing back the second glass.

"How the fuck do you know that!” Adelaide swallowed hard, her arm ready to snap as she tensed. She wished she had taken the drink before escalating the situation.

“Goddamnit.” Julia evaded the question through gritted teeth, “I thought we could have something here, but you're really an ungrateful bitch." She made a move to place the empty glasses on a clothed table to the right of them. A metallic snap sounded and the room filled with white noise.

"For your information, that was a gift from the 19th century—Utterly irreplaceable!” Julia’s finger shook with anger at the two headed pelt on the wall, her brain matter forming a Rorschachnian blot across the twin lambs.

Adelaide could sooner chalk the last four years up to an elaborate fever dream than make sense of whatever the hell was unraveling around her. The floor seemed to ripple beneath her feet, and before she could fire another round Julia’s arms slid against hers, taking control of the pistol. Her lips still wet with either syrah or cerebrospinal fluid, brushed Adelaide's ears as she cooed, “Typically, cooler heads prevail.”

Plic-Plic-Plic—

The air was saccharine like butterscotch, viscous and balmy. Or perhaps, a grape, jammy and bruised in its last moments before white began to fur over. And then a wisping squilter and churn filtered into the room, intercepted every so often by a cyclical scraping.

The morning dawn crept in through the blinds, casting a sheer golden grey over the room. Adelaide’s eyes hung heavy as if the faintest sight of light was a pill too big to swallow. Her spine wrenched back into the bed as she tried to sit up. Her wrists and ankles had been twined to the posts of the bed. Clearly her captor got a thrill from the art of rigging.

Julia’s eye socket—Vacant aside from the strongest threads of sinew—Terrorized Adelaide. But suddenly it ceased as the viscous plicking from the room adjacent turned to footsteps. Julia’s burlesque shadow toweled off in the sunlight. Adelaide shut her eyes in a bid to play possum, only to realize how stupid it was a moment later. What was the point of escape, if it were even possible, when the outside world was just as loathsome? She convulsed with laughter as her brain wrestled with her overwhelming regret and the shameful imprudence that possessed her; Rivaled only by that of her dearest Winnie.

“Well, at least you’re in good spirits.” Julia pulled a wicker chair to the foot of the bed. She rested her still wet leg on the mattress, making sure her foot could tease the captive flesh before her. The gnawed flesh at her ankle was now smooth and her eye, although threaded with red behind her black pupil, had completely rematerialized.

“So what? You’re some demi-variant? Just fucking kill me!” A solitary tear ran down Adelaide’s face, pooling in her ear.

“Don’t be disgusting." Julia scooted the chair back to the dresser opposite of them and began to rifle through a drawer. The metal flask landed on Adelaide's torso with a soft thud and she turned her face into the sheets as her cheeks burned like a scolded child.

Julia lit a cigarette—Sauntering about the bed before landing on a straddle around Adelaide's protruding hip. She grabbed the girl's face as the metal of the cap clawed against the mouth of the flask. “Drink.” Her nails dug into Adelaide’s jaw and she exhaled a ring of smoke in the girl's face, "I’m not a variant.” Julia’s fingers created an exaggerated V as the glowing cigarette reconciled with her open pout, “But I'm sure you heard about my type in the old world.”