St.York

There was a movement, a brief one, where people wanted to call it The New World. It was short lived because everyone knew, right away, that to call it The New World was to acknowledge that there was an Old World, and no one wanted to remember that. If we didn’t say After, there didn’t have to be a Before.

But there was. The world had been edited viciously, pared down, pieces cut out, reformed to put new protagonists at its forefront. Kill your darlings. And the ones left over weren’t darlings. What was left over was a world as focused and sharp as a knife, made of horsepower and adrenaline and streets glazed by street lamps and headlamps.

It would have been my place once, because I longed to live in this kind of world. If I were a car, I’d be the car swerving around the corner in a chase scene, bellowing at the top of its lungs, and this was the place for that now. But I didn’t feel on the inside the way anything outside of me looked anymore. Apparently I looked the same though, because someone recognized me.

“Holy shit. Cole St.York? Cole St.York, no way!” There was a hand on my shoulder that only stayed attached to an arm because I swivelled before I had my butterfly knife fully out of my pocket. The person attached to that arm must have been inoculated to jumpiness by exposure, because he didn’t look stung at all. His gaze instead said he loved me and everything about my drugs-sex-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle. “Holy shit. Oh man. Man. I thought you were dead. I’m so glad you’re not dead. St.York is alive- yes! Do you have it? Where is it? Please tell me you’ve still got your guitar.”

No guitar. It didn’t have the mettle to survive in the new world. I was surprised this guy did. He looked delicate, like he might crack if you dropped him on the ground. He looked like he needed casing. I probably looked like casing, with the puncture scars on my wrists and my military jacket. I looked quickly at his neck, where his pink skin covered his veins neatly, healthily. I let go of the butterfly knife in my pocket. “Nope.”

“You could easily find a new one. You’re still playing, right? I’ll be so crushed if you say no, man, you don’t even understand. There’s some great places you could play. You got a band, still? What happened to the rest of them?”

Dead, probably. I said, “dead, probably.”

His face didn’t like that. His mouth moved on ahead anyway. “Yeah, well. Music survived, so whatever. You can find a band. Hey. My buddy drums.”

Music had survived, so the musicians survived with it. There wasn’t a lot of choice in this sleek, efficient world, but there was a bassist (Raymond), and a drummer (Juliet). No one on keyboard, but I still played. Raymond came up with bass lines slowly, but once he did, it was angry and carnal; the poverty of the sounds coming from my guitar was never so obvious. It was perfect. The music we made was better than anything I had played before, because everything was flavoured with aftermath, and miles away from recovery. Everyone wanted a reminder that they’d come close to going, and instead they’d stayed, and this music scraped like we’d scraped along, and reminded the people of the little victory of being alive.

Gigs helped the nights blur together, and the more they blurred, the faster time passed. Inside the venues, we waited for the techies to set up our instruments, except Raymond, who handled his bass alone, and then we played and played. It was easier to pretend we were in the Before, and that it hadn’t happened yet and might never. There was less variation in the audiences, fewer people and not a chance at seeing someone older, but if you looked at the light long enough, you couldn’t even make out faces.

Outside of the gigs, the world was irrevocably changed and wouldn’t let us forget it. We’d leave Juliet to meditate or sleep or whatever in the apartment. We went to find food, and new venues. Sometimes we sat on the hoods of cars in the business district, expensive cars that businessmen had driven and were never coming back to. We pretended not to notice the changes in our city. Abandoned cars rusted and slowly sank on their flat tires. Gardens were overrun and the houses behind them all dark, all the time. All the schools had been repurposed or left alone. I hadn’t seen a kid in ages. I hadn’t seen a grey hair in years. The only ones on the street were young, strong, cruel, rich, fit, intelligent.

There were the leftovers, too. Leftovers lived in boxes in coolers on street corners. The sellers sat on the sidewalks next to them, no calling out, no needing to entice people. People were enticed, by their own desperation and need for survival. They paid for and scurried away with a box of leftovers, which was always in black glass, and sweating with condensation.

Raymond looked at the boxes, and the sellers, every time. He looked, always, unable to accept himself if he didn’t. I looked and then looked away. I counted them until I lost track, and I tugged the hem of my sleeves down over the puncture marks. When I got home, sometimes I opened them up again, just to remind myself there was blood under there. My veins worked fine.

I hadn’t had the taste for meat in years.

I didn’t want Raymond to know, but I guess I wasn’t very invested in hiding it either. He held my eyes for a moment after he caught a glimpse of my wrists. Some days, I felt my veins throbbing, when my heart was pumping at its regular speed. I wondered if he could see it, when we were wrapping out our equipment. He shut his case and picked it up without locking it. His bass almost slipped out before he fumbled it back into the case.

I’d never been aware of my veins before, but now it was like sediment sat in them. A little weight in each wrist and elbow where there hadn’t been any before.

Juliet waited behind the stage after one of our gigs, arms crossed, as a couple of techies unplugged and de-rigged. Her expression was pacific the way the ocean is pacific over a trench. Only her fingers digging into her arms were really losing it. “We thought you were Turned.”

Well that wasn’t my fault. Assumptions. I grabbed a bottle of water. “That was your mistake.”

“Hey, St.York,” said Victor, who had been managing us (mostly following us) since he found me on the street a few months ago, “you need to get some leftovers into you.”

There was no world in which I would eat the leftovers.

Juliet pushed me into the wall hard. My shoulder blades stung. I handed my guitar off to someone who would treat it more gently than I was. “Where the hell are you going to get leftovers? I know you- you’re not going to pay for them, Cole. So what? Is it going to be one of us? Do we have to drive you out? Do we have to make you leftovers before you do it?”

“There won’t be much of you for leftovers if you don’t let me go, tiger,” I said. “Don’t flatter yourself. I’m not looking to make you a meal.”

There was a microphone within grabbing distance of Juliet. Victor and Raymond’s presence might have been the only thing preventing her from grabbing it and swinging it at me with full force. She shoved me back again as she stepped away, like an extra precaution. Even in this sleek world, everyone was taking precaution. No one wanted to be edited out. “If you die, we have to find a new guitarist. And you’re good. But not good enough I won’t kill you if you try to make leftovers out of me.”

I said, “Again. Don’t flatter yourself.” Juliet let me go, with a smile that conveyed much more of the opposite of a smile. Raymond’s expression was more pitiful and hostile than any of Juliet’s words, somehow. I thumbed at the veins throbbing in my forehead and swallowed down my hunger.

The survival rate had suffered for seven years before it started looking up. In the first month of that seven years, a third of the population died in a whirlwind. Everyone was breathing their last breath before someone could even tell them they were sick. Every newsfeed warned us to watch our veins, and if they stood out too much, or began to turn grey, like the skin of a corpse, we were sick. No one advised going to the hospital. No one advised anything except staying away from the infected so you weren’t infected yourself.

The ones who didn’t die right away became hungry. You’d never heard so many people complain about hunger, or seen them so desperate for food that their mouths were ringed with grey and they were vomiting beside the roads. It had been weeks since I’d seen Jared, months since I’d kissed him, but I’d been hungry since. Exposed. Everyone was exposed and the hunger was just taking root.

The first to feed found out what that dead third was for. Some cultures ate their enemies to acquire their strength or abilities. Our culture aped them. Survival came in the form of leftovers. It was eat the dead, or become one. We’d found the cure, and it was us.

Seven years since the outbreak, and we were coming back finally.

If I weren’t sick, I wouldn’t have noticed that Raymond was too. I wandered into the kitchen for a meal I knew I wasn’t going to find in the fridge for the fourth time that day and ran into Raymond, leaning against the counter, looking at the fridge and thumbing his wrist. He licked his lips.

I watched Raymond throw up after a set. Sometimes the hunger did that. Made you hungry enough to turn on itself. “Attractive,” I said as he slumped over the bowl.

Raymond lay his cheek on the seat and gave me a smile that said everything opposite of a smile. “You do it prettier, St.York?”

“I think it’s getting you faster than me.”

Raymond shook his head a little, as much as he could with it still pressed to the seat. His lips were grayish. “You just think you’re invincible. Rock star problems. Get some leftovers, would you?”

I was having a hard time believing Raymond would suggest this. “You said you knew a kid once who became leftovers. You said your sister-”

Raymond retched. His eyes were open but I could tell he thought they were closed. For a moment, they weren’t seeing anything. “Those leftovers are just leftovers. No one’s coming back for what’s in those boxes. They don’t have a chance anymore. You do.”

“Do you think guitarists make more than bassists, Ray, really? How much money do you think I have?” I sat down on the floor, between the toilet and the sink. It was cramped there. I couldn’t move out of Raymond’s line of sight when his eyes focused again. “If I had that money, I’d be taking you out for a meal. You’re the one who deserves it, between the two of us.”

Raymond scoffed. A little of his colour had returned. A vein still throbbed in his neck. “That logic doesn’t work here anymore, St.York.”

Our next gig came four days later, at a club Raymond and I had scouted. I showed up and ate two burgers and some Kraft dinner, and chased it with three bottles of water and a shot. It would never stop the hunger, but it would stop the nausea for a while. I gasped a little when I’d finished drinking.

Victor and Juliet didn’t look at me until I’d finished. They looked anywhere else as they set up the drum kit. Someone had brought out Raymond’s bass, but someone was also setting it up for him.

“Where’s Raymond?” I asked, taking a step toward the bathroom.

Juliet looked savage as she seized her drumsticks. For a moment, I thought she might run someone through with them. The guy setting up the bass looked away. Victor carefully reached into his bag, resting on an amp. His voice was efficient, all the emotion edited out of it. “He wanted you to have this.”

He handed me the black glass box. Warm to the touch with all that was left of Raymond. 

Art by Chiara Bautista

Text by Lucie MacAulay