Terri

The first time someone tried to eat me, it was a middle-aged woman. We were walking from opposite ends of some town we both just happened to be drifting through. Up until then, the other survivors I’d passed slid by like oil across water. What was there to say? The world was over. We’d fucked up. But as the months went on, and food got harder to come by, something started to stick. This time it stuck. She looked at me like an animal, a predator, and the prey in me knew just what she wanted.

I turned to run, but I tripped, and before I could get up, she was on my back, her teeth tearing at my ear. She took the right lobe off with a snarl, and I screamed as a vague memory of my mother jiggling my earlobes with her index fingers floated up. That was back before she walked out on my dad – and me and my brother by extension. Well, now I only had one earlobe. And no mother. So it goes.

I’d always been a “hip” guy, which is to say: cultured, trendy, but certainly no athlete. When I felt that earlobe leave me though, I didn’t even think. I flung her off my back, pushed my knee into her chest, grabbed her head with both my hands, and smashed it into the road. Once, twice, again. I’d often read the term “sickening crunch” to describe the sound of a human head being smashed into the ground. And funny thing – it really does sound like that.

After that I got smarter. I never moved out in the open, and I got fairly good at scrounging for food, though it never was enough. The thought of eating another person sometimes crossed my mind, but it seemed like so much work. I don’t know how these Maneaters could just tear into us raw. If I was going to eat you, I’d have to at least cook you. And I was never good at that sort of thing.

I remember going fishing one time with my brother, when he was still under the impression he could make a “real man” of me. I whined the whole time, but somehow I caught a fish. It gaped at me from the hook in its lip. Gag. My brother carved it up right there, throwing its entrails back into the water like you’d throw bread crumbs to a duck, and the fish’s fellows flew into a frenzy, churning the water red to get at the stuff. Gag city.

We brought what was left of the fish home. My dad and brother were so proud, but I just kept remembering its bewildered eye and its stupid, gaping mouth. I snuck out to Wendy’s while they were drinking beer and slapping each other on the back and bought a Spicy Chicken Sandwich. I just couldn’t bear the thought of eating something I’d met personally.

All of this to say, I wouldn’t have made a very good Maneater.

But I did alright for a while. Avoided being eaten anyway. Then one day, I fucked up.

It’d been days since I’d managed to find even a bag of chips. I was starving. Literally. Not in the way you’d whine from the backseat of the van, “Mom, can we stop at McDonald’s? I’m starving!” No, literally starving to death. And what should I come across, but a McDonald’s? It’d been picked apart, but I used what little strength I had left to slide a wheeled cabinet from the wall, and lo: a cheeseburger. Maybe the last McDonald’s cheeseburger in the world, looking perfectly preserved, if slightly petrified.

I know I shouldn’t have, but with that beautiful, iconic, yellow wrapper triggering mouthwatering memories, I ate it. And it gave me the shits. Not the usual fast food shits. No, it felt like my intestines were turning inside out and dropping out of my ass. I collapsed there and awaited death in a mess of my own, well, you know. So fucking embarrassing. I was going to die in a McDonald’s.

But for reasons God only knows, he sent an angel to me in the form of Terri.

Terri didn’t look much like an angel. She looked like, well, a hooker. Which as it turns out she was – had been. She seemed somewhere between 35 and eternal, with stringy blonde hair, a skeletal frame, and big, luminous eyes ringed in thick black eyeliner that never faded though I never once saw her reapply. She’d probably been living her own personal apocalypse for years before this one; but when God sends angels, it’s best not to be picky.

In my delirium, I watched her enter the McDonald’s, her wild eyes swinging around the place like lanterns before settling on me.

“Oh, honey!”

She ran over to me. She had a big knockoff Louis Vuitton bag from which she pulled a water bottle. I chugged it so fast I choked, and she told me to take it a little at a time. Then she pulled out a sheath of Ritz crackers. I could feel my pupils dilate at the sight of them. I snatched the crackers from her, tore the wrapper apart, and shoved them into my face, coughing and spewing crumbs.

When I was done, I looked down at myself, covered in crumbs and shit, and I felt my face flood red.

She laughed.

“Honey, believe it or not, I’ve seen worse.”

And I knew she had.

“My name’s Terri,” she said, and held out her hand. I took it and kissed it. She blushed.

“Well, well,” she said. “What’s your name, charmer?”

“Arthur,” I croaked.

“I knew an Arthur once,” she said, “but he was an Aardvark.”

A joke? Had this strung-out angel just made a joke? And before I knew it, there it was: laughter. I’d forgotten such a thing existed. I must have looked insane, sitting in my own excrement and laughing at a stupid, easy joke that would have made me murderous in my past life.

When my laughter subsided, I asked her why she’d helped me.

“Well, you looked like you could use it, didn’t you, hon?”

“But the crackers, aren’t you hungry?”

“Of course I’m hungry,” she said, “but who isn’t? Besides, I’m used to not eating much.”

And from her bag, she pulled a snack-sized Ziploc full of white powder.

My heart skipped a beat.

“Is that...is that fucking coke!?”

She smiled. It wasn’t pretty, what with her yellow teeth and sickly gums, but it was charming.

“Well, it sure as shit ain’t Prozac,” she said, and produced a Bic pen cap from seemingly thin air, stuck it in the bag, and took a bump in one nostril then the other. Then she offered me the bag.

“Want some?”

It took everything I had, but I said, “No, thank you. I love blow, but it sure as hell doesn’t love me.”

She laughed.

“Well of course it doesn’t love you, hon. It’s coke, not Our-Lord-and-Savior-Jesus-Christ.”

She sunk the cap into the bag again and took two more bumps. Then she looked up.

“Shit, I’m so inconsiderate, you sober and all. Do you mind that I hit it?”

“Um...no? Yes? No? I don’t know.” I could barely take my eyes off the cocaine.

“Actually, I don’t think I can handle another snort right now anyway,” she said. “No offense, hon, but you smell like shit.”

I looked down at myself and felt the heat rise on my cheeks again.

“Come on,” she said, “I passed a creek a little down the road. Let’s go clean you up.”

She helped me to my feet, the encrusted seat of my jeans cracking with every motion. I took a few steps, then stopped. She looked back from the doorway.

“Whatsup?”

“Well, I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” I said, “but I don’t understand why you’re helping me.”

“Didn’t I already say? Because you look like you could use it. And I could use some company that isn’t trying to eat me alive. Though I certainly might let you once you clean yourself off.”

She winked and pouted her lips into what I guess she thought was a sexy look. It was cute, in a post-apocalyptic way, but not for me.

“Oh,” I said, “I’m actually...well...you’re not exactly my type.”

Her smile collapsed.

“Not your type? This is the apocalypse, hon. I know you don’t have money, and if you did, what the fuck am I gonna buy?”

“No, It’s not that. It’s just that...well...I’m gay.”

She stared at me. Then she slung her head back to the sky and laughed, with fits of coughing sprinkled in.

“What?” I asked. “Do you have something against homosexuality?”

“Oh no, hon. Definitely not. But don’t you see how insanely stupid this is? You just have to laugh.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s the end of the world, hon, and here we are, possibly the last two sane humans on earth, and wouldn’t you know it: I’m a hooker with a bag of blow, and you’re a sober queer.”

She was right. This was humor on a cosmic level. God was a comedian, and we were the punchline. She took my hand, and we laughed all the way down to the creek.

And that’s how me and Terri met. I didn’t have real friends in the world before – fucking artists and club rats. They were your friends so long as you had a bump, or a connection at a gallery, or were willing to let them fuck you. Terri was the first person who took me as I was and didn’t ask me for a thing in return. And I was the same for her.

She said to me once: “Hon, I know it’s fucked, but this is the happiest I’ve ever been. You don’t want a thing from me except me, and I appreciate you for it.”

It’s true; I didn’t want her drugs or her body. Every now and then we talked about it, about how it was maybe our responsibility to keep the human race going. To, you know, procreate or whatever. We’d sit and reflect on this for a second, then we’d laugh.

“Fuck the human race,” Terri said, “they don’t deserve it! Let them chew on each other and suck the marrow from the bone!”

Yes, what we had was beautiful, Terri and me. She was so full of surprises: startlingly cultured, shockingly educated. Take for example the titles of two pornos Terri had written, directed, and starred in herself, before her drug habit got the better of her and her entrepreneurial skills were relegated to selling her body. There was Fuck Everlasting, in which a teenage girl on the cusp of maturity gets lost in the woods and finds a magical boy, and they fuck, well, forever. Or The Girl with a Pearl Necklace, in which a young Dutch maid that works for a painter ends up modeling for him in a series of increasingly risqué poses, until he can’t contain himself and he, well, you know, cums all over her chest.

Terri also had a real talent for finding things – especially drugs. We’d come into some town, and she’d sweep those lantern eyes around the houses and apartments, and suddenly she’d settle on one and say, “There.” We’d make our way carefully, silent and, as she liked to say, sexy as foxes, and sure enough, she’d produce from somewhere: a bag of cocaine, a bottle of pills, a couple of joints – always something.

She was a wonder. But she was also sick. Often, our bouts of laughter would end in her coughing, me trying to sooth her, her saying she was fine.

“Babe,” I’d say, “I know you’re fine, but you’re not okay."

This would make her smile, but she wouldn’t tell me what she was going through. I doubted whether she knew herself. The drugs certainly didn’t help, but they made her happy, so I went with it.

One day, she turned those lighthouse eyes on an apartment building and said, “There.” It was a good haul: an ounce of bud, an 8-ball of blow, and three little Ecstasy pills. She asked me, as she usually did, if I wanted any of it, and for the first time, I said, “You know what, yeah. I want the X.”

She looked astonished.

“Seriously, hon?”

“Yes, babe,” I said. “It’s been awhile. Fuck it. Let’s roll.”

She squealed like a little girl and leaped on me, arms and legs wrapped around my thin body.

“Yes, hon! Yes, yes, yes!”

I don’t know why I wanted to do it, other than we’d come this far, and I didn’t know how much longer we had left. I wanted us to have some real fun, just once. When I saw those little white octagons in her palm, I knew that this was somehow necessary. Not just for us but for the human race. It was our duty as its last delegates.

So we raided the local Walmart. The food was scarce, but what we really needed was music. I knew our prospects in a Walmart weren’t strong, but I wasn’t picky. We just needed something with a beat that we could dance to. We found a selection of the usual Top 40 shit, a Sony boombox, and some batteries. Then we made our way out of town.

We wanted a secluded spot to throw our party, so we took a few days choosing rural roads, the kind a Maneater was less likely to follow, and watched the landscape grow more and more pastoral.

“Well it ain’t William Blake’s Songs of Innocence,” Terri said, “but it’s sure pretty.”

Where did she come up with this shit?

We followed the road a while, then Terri stopped and pointed across a field.

“There.”

I looked and saw a barn on the crest of a small hill, red against the blue sky.

I clapped my hands and hugged Terri.

The barn was dirty, full of foul-smelling bales of hay strewn around the floor and up in the loft. It had long been out of use, even before the apocalypse, but it reminded me of the dark, rank warehouses I’d once raved in. It was perfect.

“Well, should we get ready?” I asked. “We got a party to go to tonight.”

She smiled that ugly, beautiful smile.

“Let’s do it, hon.”

We shared the meager scraps of food we had left: a can of tuna, some stale Saltines. We were “fueling up” as we used to say before we hit the club. Then we sat and watched the sun set over a distant city from the open door of the barn, arms around each other. It was time.

“Bottoms up, babe,” I said as I put the X on my tongue. It tasted as foul as I remembered, but I let it sit for a second and dissolve, then I washed it down with water from the canteen we shared. Terri grimaced and did the same.

I wasn’t even rolling yet, and the amount of love I felt for this person next to me, this sudden assembly of cells and spirit who had rescued me from my own stupidity and near-death in a McDonald’s, was immense. It had all been worth it: that world before, the abuse and misunderstanding, the heartbreak and misery, just to sit in this barn and watch the sunset with Terri. If what it cost was the entire world and everyone in it, so be it. They’d never loved us anyway.

And then I felt the tension in my chest, like a hand reaching up inside and gripping me by the sternum, like a bird beating against the bars of its cage. I lifted my hands and waved them in front of my face. They left trails behind. I felt totally electric and humming. I looked over at Terri and her pupils were wide as flying saucers.

“Holy shit, babe,” I said, “your eyes! They’re fucking black holes!”

“Well, what about you, hon? With those big black eyes and that toothy smile, you look just like a great white shark!”

I gnashed my teeth and snarled, and we laughed, hard.

What happened over the next few hours was a blur. Ecstasy always is. We stumbled over to the boombox and went through the CDs one by one. Lady Gaga. Katy Perry. Rihanna. Beyoncé. We danced, letting our bodies do whatever they felt like doing. We skipped the songs we didn’t like, and once we’d heard all the ones we did, we started all over again. When that got boring, we turned the boombox off and sang.

We sang every great, overplayed, annoyingly perfect song we could think of at the top of our lungs, and we danced. We got hot, so we took off our clothes, and we danced. We danced close. We danced far. We dripped sweat, and dripped sweat, and dripped sweat. We took breaks and massaged each other. Nothing sexual; simply human. We admired each other’s bodies, the grace of the human form, the damage the human mind inflicts upon it. How separate from nature we’d become, yet how deeply of-nature we couldn’t help but be, eons of evolution culminated in this: one last dance on Ecstasy in a barn.

We laughed. We cried. At one point I saw a ghost watching us from the rafters. A pale, eldritch face from another world and time judging from on high, but I closed my eyes and shook my head and the hallucination passed.

We told stories, the ones we’d already told and some we hadn’t. She told me about the daughter that had passed from her body half-formed, unable to withstand the onslaught of chemicals. How after that the coughing started, but she never bothered to get it checked. What was the point?

I told her about Bill, my father’s best friend with whom I’d had a secret affair, and whom I couldn’t stop loving. About the day he and his family were over for a barbecue, and in the desperation of love, and emboldened by booze, I asked him to run away with me, and he punched me in the gut and said to the startled faces around him, “He just tried to kiss me! John, did you know your son’s a faggot?”

How my dad looked down on me, heaving and sobbing on the ground, and said, “No, Bill, I had no idea. But if he is, then he’s no son of mine.”

And how I looked from my father to my brother, to Bill and back, and saw nothing but “fuck you” in their eyes. How I got out of there and never saw any of them again. How I spent a year nose-deep in white powder, until I was completely dead inside. Then how one day, I woke up in a hotel room full of old men, how I looked out over a sea of disgusting, greedy bodies, and I said, “Enough. Tomorrow I’ll get help.” And how that tomorrow ended up being the one when I woke up to a world that was ending. And we laughed and cried at how the great cosmic joke of which we were the punchline just kept giving. God wasn’t much of a god, but he was one hell of a comedian.

We told all we could remember, all that was worth telling. Then we danced some more until we collapsed, and eventually fell asleep snuggled against each other. At some point I heard her get up and leave the barn, mumbling something about taking a piss, and I fell back asleep.

Later, I awoke with a start to a screech and a flash of white as a barn owl swooped over my head and landed in the rafters. It looked down on me with that haunted face from another world, the one I’d seen a few hours before. It hadn’t been a hallucination.

A mouse hung from its beak and my stomach rumbled at the thought of meat. Then I thought about eating a mouse, the tufts of fur between my teeth, and I threw up. It was all bile. I wiped my mouth and looked around for Terri, but she wasn’t in the barn, so I stepped out into the black night, still naked.

Terri was lying between two trees, pale against the fallen leaves, a Maneater on her back, tearing at her left triceps. I gasped, and the sound made him stop, and he turned and looked at me, his eyes burning with animal violence. A strip of flesh hung from his teeth, over his chin, and his dirty white shirt was crimson with blood. Terri’s blood. Terri, my partner, my friend – the only human in this world who’d ever loved me.

The beast in me awoke, and suddenly I was upon him, clawing his eyes, pummeling his jaw, feeling his teeth give way under my fists. I was crying. I was screaming. I was reaching for a rock, bringing it down on his skull once, twice, again: sickening crunch, sickening crunch, sickening crunch. I left nothing to chance. Nobody would ever be as dead as him.

Eventually the rage gave out, and I pushed what was left of him off her and rolled her over. Her eyes, wrapped in black eyeliner, were empty and serene. What had happened? Had her heart stopped before he found her? Had he pounced on her from the shadows? Her eyes were so still, the lanterns put out, and there was so much blood: on the dried leaves, on the bark of the trees, on the rock, on my hands, in my hair. I could smell it, like copper and fear. That smell. So strong. I felt sick, and worse, I felt hungry. Ravenous. That smell...

Oh shit, that smell.

I looked out over the field, and in the midnight blackness, I could make out three shapes moving towards the barn. Maneaters. Hungry. That smell. Oh shit.

I got up, knelt back down, got back up, knelt again, brushed the hair from Terri’s face, and kissed her forehead.

“I’m so sorry, babe,” I said. Then I ducked into the barn, climbed into the loft, and pulled the ladder up behind me.

I heard it all: the joyful hiss when they found the bodies, the gnashing, the tearing, the slobbering. I listened though I didn’t want to, sobbing with my hand over my mouth. Then it stopped, and one by one I heard them stagger into the barn. Hadn’t they had enough? No. People never have enough. I could hear them shuffling around, grunting, almost like a new non-language was forming in the absence of sanity. They sensed something was here, something with a pulse. I tucked myself into a corner and waited.

And then came the sniffing – long, sharp inhalations followed by slow, moaning exhalations. There were a series of grunts that sounded like a phrase. I didn’t dare look between the floorboards of the loft. I knew that if I did, I’d see them staring up at the spot where I cowered.

“Grunt! Grunt grunt! Grunt grunt!”

And the response: “Grunt grunt grunt!”

I felt them beneath me, making slow circles, trying to catch sight of me through the floorboards. I looked at the blood all over my naked body, thought of how much I’d sweat. Of course they smelled me. I was a four-course meal.

I could hear them patting the walls and beams of the barn, testing for purchase. Then one got smart. I heard it dragging something just under the ledge of the loft, then dragging something else and dropping it. It was stacking bales of hay. I pulled back as far as I could into the shadows, trembling. I’d neither the strength left to fight, nor the will.

Then my chest heaved and a cry escaped my lips as a set of fingers, nails torn and caked in blood, curled over the ledge, followed by another set, and slowly, I saw it rise: the matted, black hair, the furrowed brow, the predatory, burning eyes, the flared nostrils, then the grizzled, dripping mouth, and the mouth smiled, and the teeth were cracked and lined with blood.

Why, God? Why did it have to smile? Wasn’t it bad enough to have a world full of cannibals or zombies or whatever the fuck these people had become without them smiling? Without them delighting in it?

My whole body shook. The Maneater lifted his body halfway into the loft, seeming to relish every movement. His brothers whooped in excitement below. I tried to clench my fists – no good. My knuckles were so busted I couldn’t even bend my fingers. Fuck, Terri. This is it.

Then a screech from the rafters above, and a flash of white wings in the face of the monster. He fell backwards off the bale with a scream.

The barn owl. The fucking barn owl. I scrambled to the edge of the loft just in time to see the bird streak out the door of the barn, and the other two Maneaters run snarling after it – stupid beasts, low creatures. The smart one lay crumpled on the floor of the barn, his neck at an awkward angle over the boombox. His eyes glared up at me and I watched them revert from beast to man, a moment of dull recognition, even fear, then nothing. Empty. Just like Terri’s. I fell onto my back and everything went black.

When I came to, I was staring up into the mystic face of the barn owl. He was looking down on me, something furry in his mouth, which he dropped in front of me.

It was a small rabbit. I looked from the rabbit up to him and back.

“Is this for me?”

Of course, he didn’t answer. He held me in that impenetrable gaze, then he spread his angelic wings and swooped out of the barn.

Well, what to do now? I couldn’t stay here, soaked in the scent of blood. Those other two monsters were stupid, but surely they could find their way back here. I was weak. I needed to eat. I looked at the rabbit again. Poor bunny. Everybody has to eat, so I guess I have to eat you.

I slid the ladder over the edge of the loft and climbed down. I didn’t know exactly what I should do except that I couldn’t eat a rabbit raw. Like the first humans, I’d need to start a fire. I didn’t know what the point of staying alive was, but then again, I never had.

I found a lighter in Terri’s bag. Then I gathered up some straw and sticks and climbed back up onto the loft, pulling the ladder up behind me, just in case.

I picked out the sharpest stick and pushed it into the rabbits mouth, deeper and deeper, felt the flesh giving way. I didn’t know what I was doing, but neither had my ancestors. Like them, I was just trying something. Doing something. Later I’d figure out what next. Maybe I’d stay here – just me and a barn owl, best of friends. Maybe he’d keep bringing me rabbit, and when he couldn’t find rabbit, mice, and I’d humble myself and learn from him how animals stay alive in this world that was not so different for them as it was for me.

But I suspected that this rabbit was it, the one consolation from a universe that had watched a guy like me somehow manage to stay alive and was impressed, but only slightly. I’d have to do the rest on my own, keep going, and maybe one day I’d find more people like me. Terri and I couldn’t be the only ones. It seemed ridiculous now. Us, the only ones? Us?

No, there had to be more people, people way better at this sort of thing than we were. If I had managed to survive this long, then so had they. I’d find them somehow.

But that’s too much to think about now. Now all I can do is start a fire and cook this rabbit.

Oh, if my father and brother could see me, naked and bloody, crouched over a flame, holding a rabbit impaled on a stick. They wouldn’t believe their eyes. I hardly believe it myself.

But here I am. Still alive. Still here.

I’m still here, Terri. Tomorrow I’ll figure out what to do next, but for now, I’m still here, holding the rabbit to the flame, and the flame is licking off the fur, and the skin is browning, and it’s beautiful.

I’m cooking something, Terri, and it smells delicious.