Pariah

cocktail was what kept Mona safe out there, though pounding drugs certainly went a long way toward explaining her personality, or lack of one.

“Pregnant, huh?” Dabney sidled up to Ellen and took a spot beside her at the window, rain spatter stippling them both with dark spots. Lightning flashed, followed by booming thunder. Ellen just nodded. Karl looked over at the windows and considered the constant thunder and lightning emanating from God’s throne in Revelation.

“Is this a joyous kind of thing or an unexpected problem?” Dabney continued. “I don’t mean to pry, but it’s a big development.”

“Yeah, I know.”

As he looked over at Alan, Dabney suppressed his urge to ask who was the father. Mike hadn’t been dead that long. Maybe she didn’t know. If so, they’d never know, not even when-or if-the baby was born. Mike and Alan fit the same basic description, brunette, pale but with a slightly olive complexion. Did it even matter? Not like junior would be headed for college someday. Or even kindergarten.

Ellen smelled alcohol on Dabney’s breath. It wasn’t beer breath, either. It was distillery-strong, whiskey breath, complemented by cigarettes. His eyes were red-rimmed and hooded. It seemed to Ellen that almost everyone was in a mad rush to be medicated. Or anesthetized. Dabney gave her bicep a soft, paternal squeeze and left the apartment. From the table, Eddie pounded his fist like a gavel and declared the meeting adjourned. He and his confederates would break into Mona’s apartment and steal drugs from the kitty. Ellen took a deep breath, the air wet and redolent of death and ozone. Sheet lightning whitewashed the sky, leeching the remaining pigment from an already colorless vista. If the world weren’t already over, she’d find this a whole lot more portentous.

Psychosomatic or not, her insides churned, and she wondered if taking this baby to term was a good idea. The zombies weren’t going anywhere. It had been over five months since they’d supplanted mankind. For all Ellen knew, the occupants of 1620 were the only people left, at least in New York. What hope did her baby have? Alan was probably right.

To hell with him and his rationality.

To hell with Mona and her lack of charm.

To hell with ’em all.

As the last of her “guests” left, she slumped against the wall, wanting nothing more than to cry, but no tears came. She just sat there, hunched over and desolate. A baby. New life for a dead planet. Was that hopeful and wise, or just selfish and stupid? Perhaps later, in keeping with the narcotics theme of the day, she’d ask Mona to venture out and fill a prescription of her own: Mifepristone, aka RU 486, aka “the abortion pill.”

An ounce of prevention, retroactive-style. Better safe than sorry.

Abe lay on the bed on the spot in which Ruth had succumbed. Alan and Karl had flipped the mattress for Abe, since her seepage had done a number on the other side, even with the mattress pad in place. The air in the bedroom was stale but Abe didn’t mind. He was comfortably numb. Where had he heard that phrase before? Maybe he just made it up. The room was dark and Abe stared at the ceiling. After a short while he wasn’t sure if his eyes were even open, so he blinked a few times to clear that up. Open, closed. It made no difference. The Valium made Abe aggressively apathetic, which he supposed was oxymoronic, but who cared?

For a man as formerly opinionated as he, indifference was unnatural, and drug induced or not, becalmed or not, he felt the unnaturalness deep in his id. It wasn’t Abraham Fogelhut’s role in the universe to be its calm center. It conflicted with his essential Abeness. Was this what the hippies and yippies experienced, he wondered? When they were all dosing themselves to the gills back in the sixties, when all that nonstop navel gazing was happening, when everything was a happening, when happening became a noun, was this that? If so, Abe, in soft focus, needed to revise his opinion of the sixties drug subculture; it was even dumber and more self-centered than he’d suspected.

Happening as a noun.

Party as a verb.

Vacation as a verb.

Summer as a verb.

Summer as a verb?

Jesus H. Christ.

Between the hippies and the yuppies, English was in its death throes. And forget the coloreds and their hip- hop lingo. Ebonics, was it? If the plague hadn’t come along when it did, given the trajectory on which English was headed-at least as spoken by Americans-pretty soon the younger generation would be reduced to tribal clicking languages. Maybe the zombies did everyone a favor.

This wasn’t relaxing.

It was too soon to have developed a tolerance for the drug, wasn’t it?

When was the last time he took a pill?

Take a pill, take a pill, take a pill. Ugh, that was what weaklings did. Take a pill. The world is shit. Take a pill. Your wife is dead. Take a pill. The kids are dead. Take a pill. Take two pills. Take a whole bottle of pills and be done with it. Fuggit. Forget it. Man was made to suffer. Didn’t some poet say that? Somebody said it. Maybe it was a song. Okay, I’m making a compact with myself, he thought. In the remaining weeks I read. I read everything Mona can get her hands on. The classics. I read some, but not enough. And always it was for school. I need to make a list. Let the others do what they will, chase their tails, fritter it away, but I’m going out enriched in the brains department.

Abe got off the bed, grabbed a bar of Ivory soap and walked up to the roof, shedding garb as he made the ascent. Modesty? Antiquated notion. The downpour drummed against the pebbled-glass skylight, smearing the soot, its rhythm beckoning Abe forward. Let the others cower in their hidey-holes. Or whatever they were up to. From the sounds of it as he passed the Italian ape’s digs, some vigorous buggery. To each his own. Abe dropped the last of his attire as he stepped onto the tar paper, which shimmered with wetness, reflecting each stroke of lightning. His body, even well fed, was lank and achromatic. Had his balls always hung this low? Who could remember? The sky looked like a backdrop from an expressionist German film of the silent era-thick, black clouds set asymmetrically against deposits of leaden gray. With the recurrent lightning the buildings all became, at least in flashes, monoliths of pure black and white.

Absolute.

As a youngster Abe had been instructed in absolutes. There was good and evil, period. Good folks and bad. As an adolescent he saw little to contradict that. The Nazis were unadulterated evil, easy to fight, easy to hate. Their atrocities left no room for debate. He’d joined up and fought for good, and even though the horrors were manifold, the cause was inarguably virtuous-and this was before he was aware of the death camps. He’d seen brutality in all its gory glory. But glimmerings of gray began to afflict his psyche. His first German corpse conflicted with the propaganda. This wasn’t some massive Hun with sharpened teeth-though even as a naive teen, Abe hadn’t really expected the enemy to look that way. But this was just a kid. Skinny, blond, lightly freckled, soft pink lips, and fading color in the cheeks. This wasn’t a Nazi; this was just a foot soldier. Just a dead kid in a muddy ditch.

The world was easier to absorb before that moment. Abe had liked black and white, and he’d missed it when it was taken from him. Down below, the multitude groaned in protest of the weather, their plaint drowned out by the pervasive, ground-shaking thunder. There were no towheaded blond kids with freckles and soft lips down there. Maybe once upon a time, but not now.

They were the enemy.

Us versus them.

Black and white.

But even those things lacked malice. They were just automated instinct.

As Abe lathered up, he missed gray.

At least Ivory was pure.

Mostly.

“Pretty in pink,” Karl burbled. His skin felt funny. Not funny ha-ha, but funny. Funny- ish. “I don’t even like The Psychedelic Furs.” He looked at the pill in his palm, filched from Mona’s stash. Pink. Though the Bible didn’t address drug use, there were very clear principles outlined in it that suggested drug use