- 28 -
MASS(IVE) HALLUCINATION

It feels like I’ve been riding east for hours already but the sign on the road says I’m still only as far as the old suburbs. I glide into the parking lot of a big mall, its doors long smashed open, department store windows gutted. The sun’s coming up and the few bites of tuna I had on the beach with Shelley and Anadin wore off miles back.

The deeper into the mall I get the more light I lose. In the center is a skylight that’s also been smashed out. Days’ worth of rain has pooled on the floor below. A dead bird has its head tucked against its chest. I get on my knees and cup my hands, take a drink.

Someone’s taken the plates of broken glass that would have fallen from the ceiling. The gates of the stores are all drawn down but a lot of them are broken, too. I drift into skeletal clothes racks, find a black cardigan and tie it around my waist. Finally, there’s a bulk food store. The bins are down to the crumbs. Mice and rats have replaced what they’ve taken with their own shit.

“Shit,” I say.

“You won’t find much around here,” says a voice from behind. I spin to face a girl in flared jeans and an army parka, her tangled blonde hair turning to dreads. Look long enough and you can see she used to be pretty.

“You live here?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says, “we do. We live here.”

The girl’s voice changes then, raises several octaves until it’s nearly a child’s: “She likes to talk about how we’re all in this together but get her alone and see what she’ll do for you. She’ll write you out of her words and permanently mark you in her own version of the story. This is all going to collapse any day now and if you don’t listen to me you’ll die this way, eaten alive. Only I’ll still be here, under the extra coating of haze and smoke. That’s what’s been helping me get through this. Will yourself to a paler shade. Command your body.”

The girl’s eyes roll. Her voice refreshes into something deep and gruff: “This could be like any other night if it weren’t for you here right now. There are girls downstairs who’ll do anything for ten bucks or a pack of smokes. You want to meet them? You could be one of them if you want.”

“Be one of what?” I ask. “What are you?”

But instead of answering me the girl’s mouth starts slurring, wordlessly, like it’s fallen off its track. Dark liquid drips from under her right sleeve. Her blue eyes go from sky to navy to black and back again.

“Maybe I should just go,” I say.

The girl doesn’t move. Her legs are in place at a wide stance, her face slack.

I run, through the bulk food store, through its backroom, and out the emergency exit. I don’t stop until I’m back on my bike. I ride, and I don’t look back this time. My heart doesn’t stop pounding until I’m at least twenty minutes away. The adrenaline subsides but the hunger rises again, and with it this time comes weakness, dizziness.

The sun’s high and the heat’s still bearable but that could change at any minute. I remember Cam and Trevor had looted some houses. Just a few. Why we didn’t do it more often I don’t know. Maybe we were afraid there’d still be someone inside. Maybe we were afraid of what we’d find. But today I can’t afford to be afraid.

I exit off the highway and ride to the border of a residential area. I go for the first house I see: blue vinyl siding, gravel driveway, porch with peeling white paint, old grey wood exposed underneath.

Everything’s intact. I rattle my fingertips across the bay window at the front of the house, wait for movement—nothing. I kick gravel at the basement windows, wait for movement—nothing. I break a window and slide below ground level. The concrete floor moves. At first I think it’s fog but no, it’s centipedes, thousands of them, swirling over each other. An inch of a scream squeezes out of me and I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep it shut.

I trip over my shaking legs to get to the stairs, brush bugs from my ankles and calves at the threshold. The ones that hitched a ride up with me scatter off over white carpet and disappear into cracks only they can see.

The upstairs is green upholstery and wooden furniture, a row of stuffed animals on the back of a living room couch. I head to the kitchen and pull the cupboards open, grab at canned meat, cereal, dried peas, crackers, soups. I sniff at half a jar of crunchy peanut butter. A few of the nuts along the top are black but I stuff it in my bag anyway. I’ll eat around whatever I have to.

I pull open the drawer and grab kitchen knives and a can opener. Then I go upstairs even though I’m not sure what I’ll find up there. Still, I take the stairs two at a time.

My hands blur through costume jewelry and a drawer of old photographs. This house must have belonged to an older woman, or a couple. Grandparents, maybe. I find two hundred dollars stashed under the mattress. I’ve forgotten what money feels like. I wonder if they still use it where I’m going, decide to take it just in case.

I pull up to a low-rise apartment building, the only structure left standing on a charred block. The curtain’s pulled back on a basement window, revealing a smear of blood on the wall and an upturned coffee table. I move on, ride until the sun starts to set.

Off to the left is an old wooden barn, its slats broken off in some places, roof caved in. There’s still enough daylight to see that it’s empty. I open the canned peas and eat them cold, with my hands. I didn’t think to steal a spoon.

I dream of trees split up the middle, rotting from their centers, full of rings of maggots that spill down their trunks. Mushrooms sprout from those same rings: long, yellow-stemmed fungi spreading in skinny bodies down the base of trees, creeping through the grass.

In the dream it’s not The End. It’s just another day, except for these mushrooms that can pull apart an ancient oak. But that’s not all. I walk into a park and it smells of berries and cream, candied soda. A few animals—a couple of dogs or city coyotes, a raccoon—skirt the shade of the tall grass and broken trees.

I have to walk slowly, with my eyes on the park so the dogs don’t chase me out. But then I realize they might not even notice; they’re smelling the rotten tree rings, licking at residue and slurping maggots and mushrooms. They come away with tongues tinted bright blue from fungal fluids.

No sooner is one stem plucked before another shoots up in its place. No sooner is one stem swallowed than the animal drops, its skull coming apart, cracking open to make room for new growth, the animal’s brains used as a house for a new colony of fungi.