Anhedonia

by Chris Deal

It stood there for hours, not swaying with the beat of a heart, with no aching muscles, no pain, nothing. It just stood there, giving no mind to the cold, no thoughts to the ruined apartment, the soiled carpet or the obscene streaks and handprints on the walls. It watched the open window, the world outside, watching with static eyes. The only movement in the apartment was the snow and ash brought in on the wind, the only sound an unending series of barks from the floor above. When the dog started, the thing wandered about, making foul, preternatural sounds, guttural snarls and reverberations discordant and counter to the shape they originated from.

* * *

The power went out three days back, taking the heat with it. Snow had been falling like bird shit for weeks, off and on, mixing with the ash from the fires consuming the surrounding neighborhoods. They hadn’t reached the complex yet, though. It was so cold, I kind of wished they would. When I was a kid, there was an electrical fire one night in my family’s trailer. The warmth, like the devil’s breath on my cheek, was comforting in my sleep before my dad kicked in my door and took me in his arms, outside to the bitter cold. I’ve never been as content, as cozy as that night. Sometimes, late at night with the fever in full swing, I prayed the fires would rage into the complex, taking those things and me with it.

The fever was getting worse. It wouldn’t break, no matter what. Even without the heat, I was managing a good sweat. Still, even with the sweatpants underneath the robe and the blanket I’d taken to wearing like a death shroud, I couldn’t get warm.

The kitchen had gotten bare. Starting in the fridge, when power went out, I ate all the leftover takeout, even the Chinese food that was of questionable age. The second day I ate the vegetables, even the raw ones. I thawed various packages of peas, carrots, broccoli, and even with a full stomach, I was more and more unfulfilled. Boredom, it could have been. I tried improvising for a warm meal, filling the sink with paper, books, anything burnable I could find, putting the food in a pot, but it couldn’t get hot enough, or for long enough.

I’d kill for a cup of coffee, for a damn steak.

Despite the temperature and the fever that started almost as soon as that thing bit me, not hard or deep, but breaking the skin, I was spending the majority of the time out on the balcony, sitting on a lawn chair, watching my breath float out into the nothing. Across the street from my apartment someone else had the same thought, to bunker down until something, anything changed. Her name was Sarah, she had yelled across the cavernous fifty feet separating us. I told her my name was Ben. I noticed her there the same day I pushed the couch against the door, locking myself in. We talked until we were hoarse, about whatever came to mind, anything to break up the monotony of waiting. I’d seen her before, of course. I’d see her walking her German shepherd every night after she got home from work. Never did talk to her, of course, not until we were the last people in the area. Couldn’t remember ever seeing a car in her extra parking spot, never saw someone leaving her at the door after a date, hoping for the invitation inside.

With nothing but time, because it was too cold for Sarah to be out on her balcony for long, I tried to read. I tried a couple magazines, but I couldn’t even pretend they held my interest, not even the few I had with what was considered erotic pictures of women in various levels of clothes. There wasn’t a point. I tried some of the books I had collected but never gotten too, literary masterpieces I hadn’t had time for. Moby Dick was pointless, same with Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t even have the patience for a page of Finnegans Wake. I got a couple chapters into One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I remembered loving everything about it years before, but I threw it against the wall. I screamed just to make a noise, to hear something, to excise the frustration, the isolation. Those things heard, and they tried again to get to me, the shuffling, the weird sounds, like animals locked in cages. Sarah, if she heard me, she said nothing about it.

She had a survivalist radio, one of those that you have to wind up for power. All the stations were off, the only thing she could hear was a constant emergency broadcast, informing us the power would be restored soon, that the best thing to do was wait in home. Don’t open the door for anyone, it said, except for police or military. They were sweeping the area for survivors, and any found would be taken down to the National Guard armory in south Charlotte. They announced three days back they would be working through Huntersville, but we never saw anyone. The message had remained the same since.

Those things were still in the area, and every time I looked down from my second floor apartment, there was at least one wandering around, occasionally looking up at me, something like hunger hanging on it’s cadaverous face. I was getting to look more and more like those things with every glance in the bathroom mirror.

* * *

The thing, the abomination, had been a statue for hours, days maybe, in the winter chill. Time was nothing, the cold of no consequence. It stood there, waiting for something, anything. Outside, it’s ilk staggered through the snow, looking for their antithesis, a goal unknown even to them, to the thing standing still in it’s former apartment. It had clawed and moved as fast as it was able among the rooms when the dog started barking, trying to get to the direction the sound came from. It reacted with the stimulus. It needed sound, movement, something to strive for, the purpose of the pursuit a remote instinct, almost alien. Then came a sound, different, foreign to ears it should have been known to. Resonant even across the parking lot, the sound pierced through the silence, above the yapping, starving dog. The thing shifted, muscles tightened and loosened.

* * *

“Do you have family around here?” I asked her, the first time we spoke, the day after I locked myself in, the day the fever started.

“No. They’re up in Ashville.”

“That’s a nice area.” It felt weird, having such a simple conversation by yelling.

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you come down here?”

“For work. I’m an assistant professor at the university.”

“What do you teach?”

“English. Creative writing.”

“Are you a poet?”

“Somewhat. I can teach kids how to write poetry, but I can hardly put together a stanza myself.”

“You’ll get there.”

“I hope. What do you do?”

I wanted to lie. I’m a VP at one of the banks. A doctor. “I work in retail.”

“Where at?” She didn’t even skip a beat.

“In the Village.”

“How is that?”

“Decent enough.”

“I’m going to get some sleep,” she yelled, and with a soft smile I couldn’t return, she was gone.

* * *

The fever would not break. Sleep was harder and harder to come by. I would lie in bed for hours, hoping for a nod, wanting nothing at all but the release of nothing, from nothing. The days were getting longer, the conversations with Sarah the only thing to look forward to. There was some food left, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat. The books had been burnt in the sink for illusory warmth. I stayed in bed until I heard her call to me, then I would rise and go to the safety I felt by simply seeing her, the most unobtainable woman in the world.

I tried to sleep, to dream, hoping for a REM state, those firing neurons in my head to give me some time away from the purgatory of this place.

Five nights after the internment, I laid down against futile hope for the annihilation of sleep. I dreamed I stood in the familiar landscape of my childhood home, the backyard. I didn’t know where my family was, nor any of the various dogs of my youth. I was beside the old shack my dad had used as storage. Inside, home to any number of vermin were enough broke car parts to build an astoundingly bizarre automobile.

The world around me was the same as it ever was, but there was a particular turn in the wind and the sky was a shade never seen on this rock, the clouds pulsing and shifting, black as the dead of space, with violent undercurrents threatening to erupt the evening sky above me like something out of the apocalyptic ravings of a mad prophet, and then there came a fury and the currents of clouds became a vortex, bright as the sun, a swirling of fire high above the ground and from that malevolent tourbillon came the roar of a dying god. There came a rupture in the sky and a wave of holocaust turned the air and the land to char and I could feel it blistering me and then it was gone, only a trail in the air left by the conflagration, and like any great storm it could have only been the eye. The ambiance was ripped apart in a great searing flash and the very atoms of my being were torn away into the furor as I lifted a futile hand to protect myself and then there was nothing but the black expanse of eternity, and that was the end.

* * *

There was a flogging and an ataxia of limbs under the blankets, a body expiring, and entropy was winning the struggle, the battle nearing completion. Beneath his eyelids there was chaos, an apocalypse unfurling in his most vulnerable aspect. The lungs struggled in their mission, breath torturous and ragged, coming faster and faster until a final climax, an exhalation, and the form was vacant.

The body inert, prostrate on the rumpled bed, blankets and sheets sodden with sweat and waste, the smell of no consequence to anyone. Pallor spread across the skin and the blood pooled in the extremities, the body as cool as the room, the world outside.

The prone form lay decumbent, its rest unceasing, the entire room devoid of that bizarre spark of being, the only movement the currents of air from the open balcony door, snow and ash thrown about in cryptic patterns, alien tongues where a meaning could be found if there were any eyes there to observe them.

In the land outside the improvised sepulcher, the deviant, unnatural beasts roamed in search of sustenance, of prey, and not more than fifty feet from where the man lay in elegiac slumber, another body was mirrored in languor, the woman dreaming of a life before decimation, of a man who could have been anyone but represented the inaccessible soul currently on decomposition’s door.

Her body twitched, and the waking world imposed on the nirvana of sleep. She stretched and sighed, her voice harmonious in the hush. Leaving her bed, she went to the bathroom, dipping a hand into the bathtub full of water. As soon as she locked herself into her abode, she had filled the tub, the sink, unsure of how long she would be trapped, ensuring survival in the only way she could.

Sitting on the edge of the bathtub, her thoughts went to where she strove to keep them, the cacophony the world had turned to, the gun her father had given as a gift when she left the familial home, an instrument of protection whose mission could so easily be corrupted and perverted. The weapon sat loaded on her bedside table. She moved her mind from the suicidal urges and envisioned the man she knew so little about, over the crowd of things, whose face was now the only thing that kept her from the horrific deed.

Across the cavernous distance, there was an unnatural twitch of cadaverous flesh, an execrable motion as fingers flexed and jaw clenched. The thing that had once been a man sat up in its soiled clothes. To its feet, it unknowingly tested its capability to hold position, upright, tendons and tissue straining with the anomalous act.

In an imitation of its former behavior, the thing put a foot before the other, then repeated the movement, locomotion obtainable, it went from the bedroom to the erstwhile living room, and with obscene, and with vacant and glazed eyes, it took in the space it occupied. With elephantine drive, it went towards the barricaded door, hitting the coffee table and knocking several glasses to the floor where they shattered with a startling noise, disturbing the serenity, causing the dog left in the abode above to stir, to howl.

The counterfeit life was driven into action, trying to get to the animal, for a purpose only hinted at. The simulacrum was a void in comparison to its previous existence, nothing stirred in the blank of its mind, but the motion was real, the thing was no lie, and the noise of the animal gave it intent, and it threw its limbs against the obstructing couch, unable to reach the exit, to get to the life it needed to extinguish. In its deranged rampage, the matter the thing had excreted in death was strewn around the room, on the walls, the useless furniture.

Unable to accomplish the only point to its being, the insulting brute suspended movement, and stood in the living room, the wind and the snow blowing against its repellant body, and the beast waited with the patience only afforded to the dead.

* * *

“Ben,” she yelled across the divide, above the beasts below. Sarah refused to look down at them, to see how many were there. She knew she should not ignore them, but could not see them again. She called out again, and again. She needed him to respond. Five days trapped in the room. Her cellphone still had power, but there was no way to call out. The towers were down. She could still dial 911, but had given up after the second day without an answer. She called for him again, to say anything, to be there, even if he was what could have been across the world, she could see him, could talk to him, but he wasn’t answering. A tear fell, almost freezing against her cheek. She went inside, went to her bed, and laid down. There was nothing else to do.

* * *

It watched from the dark room, eyes dead and uncaring, but the unnatural drive that animated the form was screaming like the dead of Hell, and though there should be nothing there, the nerves of its being like dead circuitry, allowing none of the electrical impulses of life to animate the construction, it was standing with atrophied legs, it was watching with blank eyes, and the abominable drive forged in the nothing of dead brought the atrocious essence to the fore in a gnashing of teeth, in an abhorrent, animalistic growl, in languishing muscles that strove for the sound, the impetus that forced it out the balcony door, over the railing, down ten feet to the dead grass below.

The impact was of no consequence, and it was crawling towards the direction the voice came from. Its progress too slow, it rose to its feet, one deliberate step after another, pushing its kind away if those foul progeny came between it and its destination. Every despicable being had heard the calls, and they each made for the woman, isolated as she was, cut off, thinking herself safe.

Asleep in her bed and her denial, she had no idea of the crowd that had formed at her balcony, a gallery of maleficent admirers, and though some, perhaps bored of the interim, wandered away, towards anything that could capture their attention, the thing that had been Ben was secure in its attraction, its base appetite, and though the throng was halted at the sight of the balcony’s banister, it stood there for only a moment, knowing peculiarly its goal was further, that patience was a worthless virtue.

It went to the wall of the ground floor, and started pacing, back and forth, seeing the obstacle and though there was nothing in it that affected consciousness or thought, it found its way to the glass door of Sarah’s downstairs neighbor. The closeness overcame the difficulty, and the dreadful anatomy was cast against the barrier, repeatedly, torso and head and shoulders slammed against the glass until there was a crack, then a shattering, and despite the piercing of the body, the complete lack of blood save a draining of residual viscosity, the thing was inside the building, closer to its innate objective.

The building was silent, still. There came, through connecting air-conditioning ducts, through the very walls and floors, the sound of a sob, scarcely audible, but there, and it drove him forward like a shark at the hint of blood, the passion spurring the thing forward, towards the open apartment door, giving not thought for the people who had made the chambers home. The sound came clearer from the stairwell, and the fiend followed the sob like a scent, up, over steps, turning with the path of the stairs, and then the thing was outside the door, a few inches of wood separating it and what it needed, the aberrant goal.

It thrashed against the door, repeating the initial act of entrance, again and again and again, but the aperture showed no sign of give. The sobs from the inside grew louder, and the thing threw itself against the entryway harder, and the beast’s kin were trickling into the building at the growing fury, despite the sudden culmination, termination of the woman’s cries.

More bodies were beating against the entrance, the need overcoming the apathy of the dead.

About the Author

Chris Deal has published several poems and short stories around the internet, most recently Glasgow Simile in Darkest Before the Dawn and four poems in Bicycle Review. He also regularly writes about literature at Creative Loafing. He has several stories and poems coming out in the months to come, and will be publishing a collection of micro-stories through Brown Paper Publishing in early 2010.

©2009 Chris Deal