1 In my dreams, we were huddled up in the zero-degree sleeping bag, back in the squat. The fire was burning in the oil drum, bright as a thousand mother-fuckers, warm like summer on a beach. Lux and I had our hands up against each other in the dim light, just fucking around, measuring them against each other, wishing out loud that we could switch.
I was just settling into the warmth and the serenity of that scene when the shit-ass douche-jockey nurse woke me up. Me, José, and Sebastian were not in the squat in the old IRT station, but the dark-as-fuck lobby of the hellhole hospital we’d dragged Lux to, nodding out from the pills we’d taken. We were all covered in her blood from lifting her body off the street and dragging it there while she moaned this horror-film death-rattle moan that scared the nut sacks off of us.
The nurse’s mouth was in a hard line, and the circles under her eyes were dark. She shook me fully awake roughly.
“Your friend,” she said.
“Yeah? What’s happening?” I mumbled.
“She’s not in great shape,” she said. “She’s lost a lot of blood. We should airlift her out of here first thing when a helicopter comes, but even if we do . . .”
“Is she going to live?” I asked.
She looked at me hard then. The pompous ass-herpe of a jerk looked me up and down in that way that makes you want to puke all over someone. She took in my dirty, patched-up clothes stitched together with dental floss, my black eye makeup, my nodding-off slouch. I had my coat off, and her eyes didn’t miss the scars up my arms from when I lived in a shitty abusive house in a fucked-up little town and cut myself over and over to get my head out of there for fifteen seconds.
“There are a lot of people here who are clinging to life for everything they’re worth,” she said. Her mouth was still in that hard line, like she smelled something terrible. “There isn’t a lot of room on the helicopter. So I’m going to ask you something. Does your friend want to live? Or would it be better just to let her never wake up?”
2 I woke up in a cold-as-tits sweat, even though I was wrapped up in Lux’s zero-degree sleeping bag and was right next to the woodstove. It was the middle of the night, and the twins were unconscious nearby. It was still dark outside, and it was dark as pig shit inside the abandoned elevated IRT station. The only light was from the dying embers of the fire. They were still giving off the heat of being chased by fifty cob rollers, but wouldn’t be for much longer. I got up out of my sleeping bag and walked to where we’d, months ago, stockpiled wood from construction sites along one of the walls of the station. The night was cold away from the fire, but it could have been worse. Years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to be out here at all. But I barely remember those years. I quickly took a couple of square scrap pieces, ran back, and threw them into the drum. I blew on the embers, the boards blackened then caught, and soon the fire was blazing harder than a neo-Nazi at a white supremacist rally again.
I had been having dreams that had made me toss and turn and sweat. We’d been back in the hospital. José and Sebastian had been nodding out on the Valium I’d given them and were in the wrecked waiting room, no goddamn use at all. The lights were out, and nurses and doctors were running from place to place. People were moaning on gurneys. Machines were running, on backup power, in the dark. I was trying to find Lux. Where the fuck could she be? I looked in rooms with dying people, dead people. I tore blankets off of corpses, looking to see if she was underneath. But I couldn’t find her. Finally a nurse grabbed me.
“Does your friend want to live?” she’d said. She said it flat, like a robot in an old sci-fi movie.
In the dream, my voice had frozen. I tried to say yes, but I couldn’t say anything. She waited there, and I struggled to make words, a voiceless animal. I couldn’t make any words come. I knew Lux’s life was dependent upon what I said, but no matter how hard I tried, I could not make any sound come out of my mouth.
That’s when I woke up.
Every other night or so I have these nightmares, sometimes less. Sometimes I fall asleep, wake up from a nightmare, fall back asleep and have another one. I wonder sometimes if they’ll ever go away. Trauma. It’s a motherfucker.
In the dark, I tried not to think about Lux. I tried not to think about the sleeping bag that I wrapped myself up in, which used to be hers. I tried not to think about if she was alive or dead. I tried not to think.
I stood up again and walked over to one of the walls that ran down from the opening of the station to the far-back where we were set up. Several plastic shopping bags with handles hung from nails we’d driven into the wall. It had been a dirt-ass bitch finding them, no place still uses them, but we’d needed them because they were so easy to hang and seal. I pulled down the one closest to the opening of the station and rummaged around in it for a while before finding a small chocolate bar amid the other food stored in there. Keeping the bags up off the floor like that kept the rats out of them, and keeping them tied shut kept out the bugs. Underneath where the bags hung were our cans of food, and, even though it was dark, I knew exactly where the peaches in heavy syrup were. The chocolate was going to taste great with the peaches, and the Xanax in my pocket. Breakfast of motherfucking champions.
Shivering, I hustled back toward the fire and dumped my breakfast there. The fire began to warm me right away, and I felt like never moving from in front of it again. My bladder was fuller than if I’d drank five forties, but luckily, the piss bottles were right there, and José and Sebastian were sleeping. So I pulled down my pants and squatted over the one with the top cut off and let go. I didn’t have to shit yet, which was great, because it was a crotch-ugly sand-fuck to carry the newspaper I did it in down to the street and out of the squat when it was this cold.
Moving the piss bottle off to the side, I pulled my pants back up and sat down in front of the fire. The concrete floor was icy, and I could hear at least one big rat moving around down in the gully that cuts through the station, where the train used to run a long time ago. I’ve definitely lived in worse places than this. In fact, with the oil drum woodstove, all the food we started stockpiling long before the storm, the warm sleeping bags, the set of cooking pots and pans we found in the trash, the alcohol stove that Sebastian built out of a beer can and a large coffee can, and the bottles of rubbing alcohol that we’d lucked into before the storm when a supply truck was unloading at a pharmacy, I’d say it’s a pretty good place to live. Well, it was a pretty good place to live when we were all here.
It had been a few weeks since the storm, less than that since the night Lux disappeared. We’d been ready for the storm. The moment we heard it was coming, we raided the richest neighborhoods only, dumpstering outside the best grocery stores until we had enough food to last us for months. Good food, too, cans that were maybe a little dented, boxes that were just a little raggedy-ass, but good stuff. We got a stack of five-gallon bottles of water. We took the money that Lux had made dumpstering and reselling the barely used electronics that people in this town are always tossing out and bought her enough hormones to get through a while and the rest of us enough Olde English 40s to last a week. Or a couple of days. Or maybe two really wild nights. In any case, we were toasting with the booze and congratulating ourselves when the storm came.
It was more novocaine than hurricane. A lot of water blew in the open end of the station and pooled in the gully where the tracks used to be, but we were far back and stayed mostly dry. There was no power in the station, so we couldn’t freak ourselves out watching the news or anything. Lux kept bugging out because she was worried that her pile of Mixplayers and wristscreens were going to get ruined, which was later kind of funny, but not in a laughing kind of way, because they stayed dry and the whole city got ruined. But we hung out and drank malt liquor, and I tried to play guitar and sing this really old song by this guy who’s been dead forever, Woody Guthrie. I learned it from some traveler kid when I was moving around more. But I kept fucking it up because I was drunk and José yelled at me the third time I tried to sing it, said I had a shit voice, and I couldn’t play guitar. So Lux glared at him and picked up the guitar and said, “I dare you, you piece of shit, to make fun of my voice.” And then she sang it, and I sang along. Her voice sounded fucking great. I knew her when it was different. She’d worked a lot to change it, to make it more what she wanted it to be. We sang together, and laughed, and José and Sebastian laughed, too; we weren’t really mad at José anyway.
Sitting in the station, I remembered her voice singing. Breathy and soft and beautiful. “My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road, a hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod; Rich man took my home and drove me from my door, and I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.” I missed her voice singing and laughing and echoing through the station.
Lux. Fuck. Where were those fucking Xanax?
I pulled the lid off the can of peaches and swallowed a few pills with the syrup. Then I ripped open the foil on my chocolate bar and started to eat it. Slowly, a bit at a time, smelling it and letting it melt on my tongue. A few feet away one of the twins (I couldn’t tell which one in the dark), moaned in his sleep. Maybe he was dreaming about Lux, too.
I’d met her in the middle of a riot. It was a global summit in Chicago, the kind they have where a handful of first world leaders meet up and decide what they’re going to do about the rest of the world, how money is going to be spent, if they should forgive debt and let other countries put their money into fighting their AIDS epidemics and famines. I hate that sort of horseshit on principle, a bunch of fuck-ass old white men in suits sitting around in a room and calling the shots about who lives and who dies, all with a dollar bottom line. So there I’d been, all in black, with a hood up over my head, a bandana over my face, and a hammer in my hand, surrounded by hundreds of people who looked exactly the same. If we were real with ourselves, we would have admitted that the tactic hadn’t worked in decades, no matter how many of us were there, no matter how many Molotov cocktails we threw. No one had stopped one of these meetings since last century. They’d been ready for us every time since then. But we were still out there in the streets, and as I swung my hammer through the front door of a 24/7, I thought, We won’t stop them, but at least they’ll see our rage.
All around me, there was the smashing of glass. When I turned back around and looked in the crowd, I could see that the cops were firing something at us, probably rubber bullets. A sound cannon was blasting through the air. People were running away, and pepper spray was being fired off at their receding figures. I looked to my left and saw a kid up on the roof of a cop car, and then, as he jumped off, I saw flames coming up from it. I looked down and saw this tall, skinny girl curled up in a ball at my feet. She was wearing Doc Martens and this thin, tight, pretty hoodie that barely covered her head all the way. She was kind of queer and punky looking, she had shoulder-length blond hair that looked like she had grown it out from a short cut and never had it evened out. I knelt down next to her.
“Are you okay?” I shouted.
She was hyperventilating. “I’m going to die,” she said, in between breaths. “I’m going to die.”
It was pretty clear to me that she was having a panic attack. I leaned in closer.
“Deep breaths,” I said. I put my hand on my diaphragm. “Breathe from here.”
She was gasping, but she did as I told her. I reached back under my hood and pulled the rubber band off of my black hair. It fell all around my face as I reached down and slipped the hair tie over her wrist.
“Snap this against your skin,” I said. “It’ll focus the pain on one spot. Just do it like this.” I pulled the band back as far as it would go and let it hit hard against the skin of her wrist. She winced, then reached her hand up and did it again.
“Keep breathing,” I said.
All around us, the bodies in black were swirling and smashing. Everything was loud, everything was broken. We were a little oasis in the middle. People were stepping around us. The police were far away, we were safe from them for the moment, but the line of them was always moving closer. I tried to judge the time we had left before I’d have to run to get the fuck out of there, whether this girl could stand or not. But when I looked down again to the girl, she seemed to be coming out of the ball she’d scrunched up in.
“Is it going to explode?” she asked, looking at the burning cop car.
“It’s not like in the movies, I swear,” I said. “That fucking sphincter-socket will just burn.”
She got up to her knees. I grabbed her hand and pulled her up to her feet. The slightest smile seemed to play on her lips as she looked back at the cop car. I squeezed her hand and we ran away from the line of riot cops, into the mass of black-clad protesters.
That was how I met Lux. And when I’d come back to New York, I found this station, the perfect place for a squat, and I convinced Lux to ditch the overcrowded punk house she’d been living in in Jersey and come live with me. And it had been good, too. Lux, José, Sebastian, and me, building the place up together, making something like a crew or a family. Only better than my shit-bag family because they were all assholes and fuck them. All of us in the squat looked out for each other, we took care of each other, and that’s the most you can really ask for when you’re living like we were. It was better than I’d ever thought to ask for.
Nearby, whichever one of the twins had been moving in his sleep started making noise. Scary-ass horror film shit. I dug one of the peaches out of the syrup with my fingers and tried to ignore the creepy sound he was making. It was definitely Sebastian—the light from the fire had grown, and I could see his slightly smaller frame. Not that either he or José was tiny. They were both ripped as fuck, but José more so. Every day he stacked the boards in our woodpile together and lifted them to keep his muscles strong. Every morning, he and Sebastian went running together. Well, some days when Sebastian was hung over, he skipped. But José never did.
I had never thought those two would come out here and live with us. They weren’t squatters, they weren’t punk at all, they lived with their family who was a little crazy but pretty close and all, they went to the last community college left in the city and got good grades. Straight-up upstanding motherfuckers, even though I knew them from radical politics. Good kids. Not who you expect to be living in squalor in an abandoned train station. But about two weeks after Lux and I started gathering things for the squat, they left their house. I didn’t know it, but it had been a long time coming. Their mother and father had brought them into the country without legal documentation about five years before. With the new immigration laws that had been passed, the two of them could have become citizens if they turned their parents in. They became activists instead. They left home to protect their family from the scrutiny they were sure they were bringing on them.
I’d met them years before at a May Day march planning meeting. Meetings, especially ones for big marches, can be so fucking balls-biscuit stupid. I was giving the permit committee shit about us not needing a permit at all, and everyone was really annoyed, except for José, who thought I was funny and made Sebastian come get stoned with me in Tompkins Square Park later. I’ve seen them in meetings and at activist houses way out at the edges of the city for years since then, on trips I took here before I settled down in the station. When they said they needed a place to stay, I thought about it for a minute. Like I said, they didn’t seem like the type I’d expected to be living with up there. They were friends and all, but I kind of didn’t want them around. But Lux said, good people help good people. If there was anything I wanted Lux to think about me, it was that I was a good person. I wasn’t always. I’m not. But she had this kind way that I don’t know how she’d never lost with all she’s been through that made me want to be kind, too. So we let them stay.
We all lived together in the months before Bernice. It was kind of a weird-ass arrangement. The twins woke up early every morning to go running while I slept until noontime. When I did get up, it was to chug dumpstered coconut water to get rid of my hangover. Lux disappeared for hours every day, searching out the garbage cans of rich people so she could scrounge up last year’s wristscreens and computers. It was stuff that wasn’t good enough for these rich people anymore, but which Lux listed on message boards out in Jersey and sold to people who weren’t rich. She gave them good deals, most of the time, and sometimes she just straight up gave them the stuff because she’d get to the meeting point and there would be a middle-aged couple who didn’t speak any English and their kid whose eyes lit up like a pinball machine when they saw whatever she’d dug out of the trash. José kept telling her she couldn’t do it, that we needed the money, so she said, “Go ahead, you go out there and get this stuff out of the trash, you figure out what’s good and what isn’t, and then you can tell me what to give to who.” I knew, and José knew, that the toughness was partly an act, but when a really nice person gives you a hard time, it often shuts you up more than when an asshole does.
The peach syrup was dripping off my fingers, so I flicked them toward the fire and listened to the moisture sizzle and disappear in the flames. Next to me, Sebastian’s moaning turned into coughing. Real, heavy-duty coughing that was shaking his body. I shook the rest of the syrup off my hands and turned around just in time to see him raise his body up and power puke across the ground. I jumped back, pulling Lux’s sleeping bag with me.
“Sebastian?” I said. I stepped closer, avoiding the vomit. It stunk like an ass blossom. “You take too many pills?”
In response, I just got this quiet sort of wail. I really couldn’t tell in the dark, but he might have been really pale, and a little green. I stepped closer to him.
“You okay, man?” I said. The Xanax was starting to make me feel warm and relaxed even as my tension should have been skyrocketing. As it was, I just felt this kind of dreamy spaciness. Oh, my friend is puking everywhere. Will have to deal with that at some point. I walked a little closer and knelt down next to him. I put my hand on the back of his neck.
He was burning up with fever. The heat of his skin against my hand warmed me more than the fire had.
“Sebastian?” I said again.
“Jesse? What the fuck?” he murmured. “I feel like shit.”
The puddle of vomit was spreading across the floor. I put my hands under Sebastian’s armpits and pulled him up and away from it.
“Come on,” I said. “Let me move you and get this cleaned up.”
I half walked, half dragged Sebastian over to the edge of the platform, where the gully was, so that if he puked again, it would be down there. Then I took one of the jugs of rubbing alcohol and spilled it over the puke, and, with a broom we kept in one of the corners, sluiced it all down into the gully. As I was doing this, José woke up and asked why I was making so much noise.
“Your brother is sick,” I said. “Wake the fuck up.”
I was really goddamn pissed off that I had to deal with this. But I went over to the food area and grabbed one of the few bottles of coconut water I still had and brought it over to Sebastian.
“Drink this,” I said. I knelt down and put one hand behind his head and brought the other, holding the bottle, up to his lips. He took little sips and immediately puked them back up, down into the gully. José was next to him now, looking alarmed. We all care about each other a lot, okay, even if I was pissed, I still did care. But I’ve never seen anybody care about each other like José and Sebastian do. Right then, José had this look on his face like he was the one projectile vomiting everywhere.
“Sebastian? Bash?” José said. “What’s going on?”
“So . . . fucking . . . sick,” Sebastian managed, curling deeper into a ball.
José looked up at me, pleading in his eyes. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. Around me the empty station felt hollow and enormous. Beyond that, the city felt feral and dangerous. And here we were, with a sick comrade, and no one to help. Even the hospitals, which had been a nightmare when we’d had to take Lux, were abandoned now. “I have no fucking idea.”
3 Before the storm, when Lux and I used to walk down the street together, I mostly gave everyone dirty looks. I was never sure if they were staring at me or her, gawking with their mouths open. For a while, it looked like things were going to get better for people like us, or so I’m told. I mean, the laws are there—they can’t technically refuse us health care or fire us from jobs. But what about people like us, people who could never afford health care, people who wouldn’t even be allowed in the door for the job interview? That’s a lot of us. And the violence has gotten worse and worse. The people who hate us shoot up clubs, they shoot our sisters, TWOC get beaten to death every dirt-ass shit-fucking day walking down the street. I’ve never done sex work, but most of the trans kids I’ve ever met will fuck for a bed to sleep in on a rainy night. The ones who don’t get murdered get so worn down by living in a world that wants them to stop existing that they do the bigots a favor and save them literal blood on their hands by offing themselves.
So we’d walk down the street in our dirty clothes, with my jailhouse tattoos, looking filthy and fucked-up, and people would stare. I was never sure at who. Sometimes I barked at them, not, like, snapped or yelled, but actually barked. And most people, when they see some amorphously gendered crusty street punk growling and snarling at them, stop staring. They walk away.
Some people don’t. They’re the ones you have to worry about.
I got read all different kinds of ways. Butchy lesbian. Young dude. All-around freak. It was complicated, even for me. I hated the facial hair that I grew because I’m naturally disposed toward it, but I also bound my breasts and hated menstruating. I wore men’s clothes, and women’s clothes, and so much eyeliner that sometimes Lux called me “the punk raccoon.” Lux got read as a woman, except by people who were assholes, who would rather look at things like her barely noticeable Adam’s apple, the fact that she sometimes had some facial hair that she didn’t have the money to get lasered off.
That was all before the storm, when we were walking around this New York City that didn’t want people like us anymore—poor people, non-socially-acceptable genderfucking people, radicals. Lux was from Jersey, so, at least geographically, living here wasn’t too far a stretch of the imagination for her. But me, I’d been all around the country, to every city you could imagine. The small towns were like death for me—not even figuratively, because once in West Virginia, I’d had a bunch of ass-douche bros chase me down the street with a baseball bat. The big cities, a lot of them were good to disappear into, but it was New York that I really loved. I guess I fell in love with it this one Christmas before I’d met Lux or José or Sebastian. I was fifteen and I’d just left my shitty, abusive home, I was traveling around with these dudes who were older than me, and we got to New York, and they had a place to stay, but they said I couldn’t come, and suddenly I wasn’t traveling with anybody anymore. I was by myself. The city was empty, because, as I later found out, the city’s always empty on Christmas when everybody who wasn’t born here goes away to their families and lots of the people whose families are here go away on skiing vacations and shit like that. All those rich people were gone, and I didn’t have to watch them scurrying around the streets with their little dogs in bags, and their purses that cost more than anything I’ve ever owned in my life, and their shoes from Milan and Paris. It started to snow, which never happens anymore, and I was walking down a street in Chelsea, and there were all these lights in windows, and nobody but the people who came in from out of town to work, and even they were closing things up and going back to where they came from. And I (just a kid, remember, and probably not nearly as cynical as I am now) felt like I was in this perfect snow globe or something. Everywhere I walked there was something beautiful to see, buildings and bookstores, and museums. The sun set down a long street, glowing behind the snow clouds, and the river glistened at the end of the street, and I thought, I could just stay here forever.
New York would be great, if it weren’t for all the assholes that live in it.
After wandering the United States for years and always coming back to the city again and again, I’d finally found that abandoned station. And suddenly it was like I could have a place here. It had to be somewhere that nobody else wanted, and by that time, mostly everyone who lived on the streets had been shipped out with one-way bus tickets provided by the city government.
The first couple of days after the storm had been almost a relief. Once the water receded, the streets were empty. There was no one to harass us. We raided a pharmacy for drugs and more hormones for Lux. We raided corner stores for booze and we holed up in our little abandoned station home and drank and got high and played guitar and one night Lux and I made out and then the next day we pretended that nothing had ever happened and went back to being friends until we made out again a couple of days later, then forgot about it again.
Those post-storm days weren’t bad. Until the night when they were. The night that we ended up in the nightmare hospital and Lux was gone, maybe forever.
Things seemed pretty scary again when Sebastian got sick. José and I kept trying to get him to drink water, and he kept throwing it up. He had really bad diarrhea, too, and even though I kept trying to clean out the bucket he was shitting into with lime, the whole place stunk like death. I washed my hands with rubbing alcohol every time I touched him or the bucket. José was worried sick and wouldn’t leave his side. After the second day of it, we decided we needed to do something.
“You have to go to a pharmacy and try to get some antibiotics,” José told me.
“Alone?” I asked. None of us had left the station alone since that night that Lux had disappeared.
“I can’t leave him, Jesse,” José said. There was a softness and a pleading in his voice that I don’t think I’d ever heard before. He’s always so brash and hard-ass; Sebastian is the mellower one.
It was nighttime, and the puking and shitting was getting worse. We were seriously worried about Sebastian making it through the rest of the night. I wanted to help. I was also scared out of my mind to be out in the streets by myself.
“Okay,” I said, finally. I leaned down and laced up the boots I always keep untied when I’m walking around the station, and I went over the place where we keep our crowbars. I picked it up and felt its weight in my hand—a great weapon and a useful tool. I grabbed a duffel bag in case I found anything we needed besides the antibiotics. I walked over to the fence that separates the station from the outside world and climbed up it.
Down under the station, I looked all around me, paranoid as fuck. I stepped quietly, listening everywhere for any noise. The wind blew down the empty streets. There was a full moon above me in the night sky. It was so bright that the buildings and the dead streetlights cast shadows down on the ground. The asphalt streets were covered in the dirt and garbage that had been left behind when the waters receded. I turned in a circle, looking, listening. I didn’t hear anything.
I walked south. To the west, there wasn’t much, the Major Deegan Expressway and the Hudson. To the east was where all the stores and pharmacies were. That was where I walked, my boots crunching garbage and glass beneath me.
The first pharmacy I found was mostly ransacked—we had been there before, but apparently lots of other people had been there since. The things that hadn’t been taken were dry now, but had clearly been waterlogged—swollen boxes of cereal and mashed potato flakes, filthy packages of socks, little ruined pots of blush and eyeshadow. There were still a few bottles of juice and water around, and I stuffed the few that I could carry into my duffel bag.
The next store I found was the same. Most of the waterproof things were gone, except the cheap perfume and the shaving cream. Looking at the shaving cream made me think of how regularly Lux had managed to shave even though we were living in a squat with no running water. Every morning and afternoon, she’d put a tiny bit of water in a bowl, lather up, and shave, running her hand behind her razor. Twice a day, no matter what, even after there was nobody around to see her face. She said it wasn’t about being seen by others – it was about how she felt. Standing in the pharmacy, I sighed audibly. Even here, filled with fear and not far from danger, I couldn’t keep my mind off of her.
I shook my head, trying to get the thoughts out. I had to keep my mind on the task at hand, or I could end up dead. I walked out of the pharmacy quietly, carefully, listening all around me. Down the street, the dark facade of the line of buildings loomed menacing over me.
The next pharmacy was mostly the same. I found a few more bottles of water and juice, but nothing much. The floor was scattered with crayons, a rainbow of little sticks that cracked underneath my boots as I walked on them. I moved through the store quickly and went on, looking for the next place.
It took some zigzagging down empty streets to find another pharmacy, but finally I did. I hit the jackpot in this one. There were pills that had clearly been up above the flood line scattered all over the floor. Someone had gone through them pretty well, taking most of the ones that I recognized as Xanax, OxyContin, and Valium. But it didn’t look like the person had been able to recognize one of the manufacturers’ kinds of Klonopin, so I scooped those up and put them in my bag. As I was picking them out, I saw a bunch of purple and pink capsules, which I knew were antibiotics. They were the prettiest ones on the floor. I grabbed a bunch of those, too, and stuffed them in my bag.
As I was walking out of the store, I heard a noise in one of the ruined aisles. It sounded like a clicking at first, something hard hitting the floor. My heart started beating fast, remembering that night Lux disappeared. The group of prick-goblins who had overtaken us in the street, calling us homophobic slurs, swinging their fists and beer bottles. A flash of something silver. Running, running. And, when we realized Lux wasn’t with us, circling back and finding her there on the street in a pool of blood.
As the clicking got closer, there was a low growling. I looked over and saw this dog there, dirty and mangy-looking with matted orange fur. Its lips were drawn back and its teeth were bared. I raised my crowbar above my head and crouched at the knees. It leapt at me. I swung the crowbar down, aiming at his head. I missed, and it latched on to my leg with its teeth. I kicked at it, trying to get loose. Soon we were rolling around on the floor, and my crowbar clattered away from my hand. I was bleeding, which only seemed to be making the dog crazier. It was lunging for my face.
I pushed with all my might and sent it flying back a few feet. In the space of those few feet, I reached out and grabbed my crowbar. Jumping up, I swung it over my head and brought it down on the dog’s head with all my might.
The dog was dead, its head cracked and bleeding. I was standing there looking at a formerly living creature’s brains, my body shaking, my breathing heavy. I don’t give a fuck about animals, I really don’t, and this one had been trying to kill me. After a minute, the adrenaline left my body, and my pulse was back to normal. I popped an antibiotic, and searched around until I found some gauze that had been above the flood line and was still clean and some peroxide. I pulled up my pant leg and poured the peroxide on the wound on my leg, then wrapped it up. It wasn’t too bad. I pulled the leg of my pants down and tried not to think about it.
Then, I went back to where the pills were scattered on the ground. I searched around and found a lone Xanax. On second thought, I grabbed a random handful and shoved them in my mouth. Something was bound to happen if I ate them all.
4 Back at the station that night, I stared into the fire as José slept fitfully and Sebastian tossed and turned and puked his fucking guts out. The pain in my leg was throbbing, and it was almost like it got into my head and made it raw and bloody there, too. I couldn’t keep my mind off of the night that Lux disappeared. I kept replaying it over and over.
Lux, José, Sebastian and I had been down in the streets. We were pretty lit, and we were yelling at each other, goofing around, throwing rocks we found through windows down near the ground just because why the fuck not? We didn’t even hear them coming.
Suddenly, they were all around us, a bunch of guys. As soon as I saw them, I almost shit myself. It was obvious that they wanted to fuck us up. Hell, they must’ve known we didn’t even have anything to steal. We were in the streets of an abandoned city, and we were surrounded.
“What’s that?” one of the guys asked. “A bitch? Or a faggot?”
“It looks like a faggot to me,” another guy said.
I grabbed Lux’s arm and tried to back away, but one of the guys pushed me from behind.
“You got a pussy or a dick, faggot?” another guy said, laughing. “Wanna show us?”
My heart was beating so fast that my head felt tight. Putting my hands up in front of me, I feigned surrender, all while backing up. As soon as I ran into the guy behind me, I bent my elbows and swung them back, hard, into his stomach. If I’d had a gun, I would’ve killed him. Ass blossoms like that, they don’t deserve to fucking live, it’s them or us. But I didn’t have a gun or anything, and I was fucked up and didn’t even have a crowbar.
He fell down and we pushed through the circle of them. I saw flashes, something making a quick motion in the dark. I ran and ran and it wasn’t until blocks later that I realized there were fewer of us than there were supposed to be.
“Lux? Lux?” I said. Her tall, thin frame was the one that was missing. I leaned over my knees and tried to catch my breath. “Where the fuck is Lux?”
“I don’t know, Jesse,” José said. “We gotta get outta here. We have to get back to the station.”
“No, we need to find our goddamn friend, you shit socket,” I said. Would I have done it for someone else? Even José or Sebastian? I didn’t know. But it was Lux that was missing. “Come on.”
We circled back around, going a block out of our way. The guys were gone from the spot, but Lux was still there. Laying on the ground. Bleeding everywhere. Unconscious.
“Is she dead?” Sebastian asked as we knelt next to her.
I felt for a pulse in her neck. It was there, but just barely.
“She’s alive,” I said. “She needs to get to the hospital. We have to carry her there.”
She was heavy. We had to keep stopping every couple of blocks to put her down, even though the twins were pretty strong. After a while, she started making these horror-movie noises in her throat. Scary as it was, at least we knew she was still alive.
We thought we knew where the hospital was, but when we got there, we were wrong. I was getting sweaty and frantic as a pig fucker on a goat farm. The feeling reminded me of when I was a kid and my mom used to get too drunk to cook before my dad got home, so I’d try to do it. And after about an hour, standing over the heat of the stove, knowing how my dad would react if he came home and there was no food, I’d start panicking and sweating. That was how I felt right then. Fucking trauma.
We circled around some more, until, finally, José went off looking for the hospital by himself. We put Lux down against a wall, sitting up. Her head hung from her neck like it was broken. I took her face in my hands and pulled it up so that she looked like she was sleeping with her head leaning back against the wall.
“Lux?” I said. “You’re gonna be fine. I promise this will all be fine.” But even as I said it, I could feel the blood soaking her coat. Was I lying to my dying friend? I had to. I didn’t know what else to do.
After what seemed like forever, José came back. He had found the hospital. We picked Lux up and carried her there, not stopping once. We knew we were there when we saw a giant building with a mural on the side. Even in the dark, the pastel figures of nurses and doctors helping patients shone. I’d taken someone here once before, a traveler kid who had been staying in our squat and OD’d. I swear, the nurses and the doctors hadn’t even seemed like they judged us. They saved his life, then a nurse talked to him a little about getting clean. She didn’t even push him, just asked him if it was something he saw himself doing. They hadn’t even asked me much besides what he’d taken so they’d know what to do right away. Right then, with Lux leaking blood everywhere, I hoped they would be able to help her as much as they’d helped that kid.
We walked through the front door of a completely empty waiting room. The lights were out, and the only glow came from a flashlight that had been left at a desk. The room was entirely abandoned. No screening nurse sitting behind a desk, no one waiting. There were still marks on the wall where the water had gone up to before receding, and there were chairs scattered all around the room.
I stepped over to the flashlight. In its glow, I could see the blood all over José and Sebastian’s clothes. I couldn’t see it on my or Lux’s black clothes, but I could feel its wetness on me. José leaned back against a wall, and he and Sebastian let Lux’s body slump against him.
“There has to be somebody here,” I said. “It’s a fucking hospital. I’ll look around.”
I grabbed the flashlight, leaving them there in the dark, and started looking for a way to get upstairs, above where the water line had been just a few days before. The elevators were obviously out of order, so I searched around for a staircase. After looking for a bit, I found one. I hesitated before opening the door. What would come out if I did in this dark, creepshow place? A serial killer? A wave of blood like in the movies? I took a deep breath and pulled the door open. Nothing. Just an empty, dark staircase.
I climbed up to the third floor. I paused again before opening the door back into the hospital. What if there was no one there? What if I was going to have to watch my best friend bleed to death while no one helped her?
After a minute I realized that the possibility of help was better than doing nothing, and pushed the door open. I found myself in the middle of chaos.
On this floor, there were beds full of people all along the hallways. There were more flashlights and a few camping lanterns sending their eerie glow into the darkness. I heard the electronic sounds, beeps that sounded in crescendos, like the chirps of crickets on a dark night in the country. There were people moaning and begging. Machines were blinking, probably on battery power. Between the beds, nurses in pastel colored scrubs ran around. They were obviously doing their best to help who they could, but it was also obvious that there was only so much they could do.
“Where is the fucking helicopter?” I heard one of women in a stained white coat yell. “We need to get more people out of here!”
I ran up to her.
“I have an emergency!” I yelled, grabbing her arm.
She whirled on me, her near-hysterical eyes flashing above the deep bags underneath them. It was obvious she hadn’t slept in days.
“Get in line,” she snapped.
“My friend got stabbed,” I insisted.
She pointed. “Well, there’s another stabbing. And three shootings. Not to mention the people who were here before the storm. So get your friend up here and we’ll get to them when we can.”
“She’s fucking dying!” I shouted. “You can’t let her die! You have to do something. Please.”
The doctor didn’t seem to have any sympathy. “Do you think these batteries in these machines are going to last much longer? Half the hospital is going to die if these helicopters don’t get back here again and again until everyone’s out. And it’s been hours since the last one was here. So, like I said, bring your friend up, and we’ll get to her as soon as we can.”
I didn’t know what to do. I started crying. Which I never do. Which I hate because I hate feeling weak, I hate letting people see me be vulnerable. But I had no idea what to do. Suddenly life without Lux seemed like exactly what was going to happen, and I just didn’t know how that could possibly be. I wiped at my eyes and came away with a handful of black mascara, which was running down my face making me look like a fucking clown or something. I turned away from the doctor, knowing I wasn’t going to get anything more out of her. I started back toward the stairs. As I was walking, someone stopped me. It was a nurse with scrubs with kittens playing with balls of yarn on them. She put her hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll do what we can,” she said. She shrugged helplessly. “It might not be enough. In these conditions, we might not be able to do enough for any of these people. I’m so sorry.”
Then she started to cry. Not huge, racking sobs or anything, just a few tears leaking out of the corners of her eyes and splashing down on her kitten scrubs. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone in her position cry.
I went back down to the lobby to get the twins and Lux. We carried her up the stairs. When we got her up to the third floor, a nurse grabbed a gurney and put her body on it. Her body. I wasn’t sure if that was what it was now. Her breathing had gone shallow, and I wasn’t sure if she was still there at all.
The nurses wheeled Lux away, presumably to some surgery room. They wouldn’t let us follow. We stood there in the hallway, listening to the moans, the dark doors of rooms looming around us like open mouths of jack-o’-lanterns with no lights in them. I grabbed Sebastian’s hand and pulled him toward the staircase. I couldn’t stay there with all those dying people. We made our way down to the second floor.
Opening the door there was a big mistake. I shone my flashlight around the hallways and saw gurneys everywhere with bodies on them. The bodies were covered up past their foreheads with sheets. Some of the sheets had blood and puke and piss on them. The smell was atrocious, even in the cold.
I’ve only ever seen a dead body once before that. I was out sleeping in a train yard, back when I was traveling around more. I found a body just lying there in the weeds, dead for some time. Nobody had bothered with it, probably didn’t even know it was there. The smell had been the same as what I was smelling now, but not quite as bad because the body was old and it was cold outside. It was cold in there, but all those bodies piling up must have raised the stink level. I covered my mouth with my sleeve.
We went back to the staircase and made our way down to the lobby. Shining the flashlight before us, we righted some chairs and sat in them. They were still a little soggy from the floodwaters, but it was the least of our troubles. I had some emergency Valium in my pocket. I didn’t want to share, but I figured the twins needed them as much as I did right then. So I offered. They both took one, even though Sebastian doesn’t take a lot of drugs and José never does. I took three. I noticed that Sebastian was shaking.
The twins nodded out, leaving me in the dark room almost alone. I turned off the flashlight and stared into the dark, my eyes wide. I started drifting in and out myself. When I woke up it was always to thoughts of what life would be like without Lux. I tried to stay hard. I had been okay before her, maybe I hadn’t always had someone to share things with, and talk to really deep, late at night, like the two of us did. But I’d survived. I kept trying to tell myself, I’ll survive this. It started repeating it like a mantra. But I kept waking up to tears running down my face.
Then the asshat nurse woke me up. That was when she asked me if Lux even cared about living.
“Yes,” I said immediately, not even able to believe the words were coming out of this shit biscuit’s mouth. “Of course she wants to fucking live. Now do your goddamn job and save her life.”
She looked at me for a long moment, not saying anything. She was judging me as much as anyone ever had. Finally, she spoke.
“We take her out of here on the next helicopter. No waiting. Now why don’t the three of you get the hell out of here?”
“Not until the helicopter takes her away,” I said.
And there we stayed, nodding off and crying, alone in the dark waiting room and huddled together, until the building shook with the copter touching down on the launchpad on the roof.