The Wrong Time For a Conscience

Someone once said the first step in the end of the world was burning all didactic texts. They didn’t expect Lord of the Flies to become one of them. The world, After, was the sleaker, sharper, younger sibling to the world Before. If the baseline for the city before had been functional, now it was abusive.

The first year was a steep learning curve. The motto: nothing that isn’t needed. Everything was viciousness. Smiles with bared teeth. All sound edited to include aggression. The roadways had been some of the most monochromatic in the world, once. Strict laws and societal norms flooded road networks with Hyundais and Kias in all shades as long as they were shades of grey and silver and white. That was the first sign of the changing world. Cars as colourful as explosions, and the uselessness of the dashcam.

Everyone was watching for other signs.

In the first year, I wasn’t made for this city. It wasn’t the place for me anymore until the motto was destroyed, and we began to want again, instead of just need. I found that out when I was thinking of packing, leaving, looking for another place with a space for me.

Someone said my name.

“Theo Cole-York! Fuck me!” Someone tapped my elbow. I spun around. No one was supposed to touch me, ever. And no one usually did. A hand went to my skin; my and went to the switchblade in my pocket. The city was full of sharp people now. If you weren’t careful, you’d cut yourself on one. The guy didn’t look offended. His mouth wasn’t an O so much as a sideways D. I was about to tell him there was no way in hell I was going to take instruction from him when he kept babbling. “Jesus shit. Bro. I thought you were freaking dead. No one saw you. Theo Cole-York is alive and kicking. Do you still have your bass? Come on, tell me you have it.”

I put my hands in my pockets. The guy wasn’t much younger than me, but he was softer. Uncut hair, which was the style now, and tight blue jeans. He wasn’t wearing many colours, but he was still more colourful than me with my black pants and sweater and black hair. He smiled; he had the smile of a catholic cherub. It wasn’t for proof, it was just an ordinary smile. His teeth were white and even. I let go of the switchblade and slouched. “Okay. I have it.”

“Seriously? That’s awesome!”

“Not seriously. I lost it.”

He looked the way I thought a Disney woodland animal would look if you refused to befriend it. “That sucks. But dude, we can find you another one. You can come play at my place. The stages are opening again. Say yes. It’s exactly your scene. You’ve never played at a club like this, but it’s your kind of club. When was the last time you played? It’ll come back to you, whatever. Where’re the guys?”

There was a girl in the band as well, but I didn’t say that. I didn’t know where any of them were. I could guess. So I said, “Dead.”

He looked briefly disapproving, like I shouldn’t have said it so bluntly to someone as young and admiring as him. Then I saw it was disappointment, and a sort of snarl. He had vitriol in him, and no way to ignite it without burning himself up. Like the entire city. “We’ll get you a band. It’ll be good.”

One of the worst, undocumented symptoms of the virus was the anger left behind. It wasn’t a symptom of having a virus. It was just a symptom of being one of the survivors.

He pulled the band together from the sleek, young wreckage. A guitarist, a drummer, and a keyboardist, which I didn’t need or want. But the guitarist, Declan, said he was worth keeping, and I trusted Declan when I heard his first song. He took his time coming up with the simplest riffs, but once he had them, they shook the stage like a geological seizure. If there was ever going to be another Wikipedia article about the history of music, this would be a subsection called Aftermath. The sound was savage and starved, like everyone who fed it and ate it. It wasn’t music for people who wanted to escape. It was music for people who didn’t want to exist. Even people who didn’t know they didn’t want to exist.

Shows always had a quality of wet paint. They ran together, even separated by stages and cities and crowds. People still new the name Theo Cole-York, and they screamed it when I led the band onto the stage. The crowds were culled. Only the leanest and most feral attended. I pictured the rest of the crowd outside the door, waiting to come in, right until we left the stage again.

We went across the state, then across several more. Places that were unique when they were thriving were all the same now. Desperation, the great equalizer. The nights were weren’t on stage, I saw the changes in the world. Declan and I left the vans and equipment and went looking for food and new clubs. We took the cars with us sometimes. The more colourful they were, the more we were reminded of the conformity of Before, and the people who would have disliked us for them.

The streets were all the colour of sulfur. There were more empty houses than ever, but people preferred being outside of them to being inside. In the first year, empty cars had blocked roads all over the place. The new crowd had gotten loud about it, then productive, and they formed groups wherever one was needed to push an empty car over to the side of the road. The cars never went anywhere. Metal buckets on flat tires were a dime a dozen.

The people on the streets were the strong, the terrible, the rich, the ripped-jean crowd. Grey hair only came from a bottle now. Children were an endangered species, if they were even around anymore. I hadn’t heard of any in years.

And there were the profiteers. Beetles, they were called. They would die last, everyone joked. Or mocked. Or cursed. They lounged on the sidewalks. In the squares outside malls. Or they sat half out of the back of huge silver cars. With long, thin cases at their feet. Needles was their product, and their demand was high. Each Needle was a promise of extended life. That promise was enough to get someone’s attention a street away. Sometimes the cases were open, the Needles visible, and the barrels were dewed with condensation.

Declan refused to look. He didn’t desire them at all. He wasn’t like anyone else, and I didn’t want him to be. He was right. It was the worst kind of dirt to drag your robes in. But nobility had gone the way of grey hair. I counted the Needles, as many as I could see in the yellow pallor. Back in the vans, or in a rented apartment, I dug my pinkie nail into my arms. It didn’t feel like a Needle would have, but I felt less like a death clock on legs for doing it.

Declan saw it on my teeth first, before I even thought to check the mirror. During a gig, I turned away from the audience. They always wanted my face, and dismissing them was like dangling the rest of their lives in front of them. Looking away from them, I grinned at Declan. Or I bared my teeth. His cue was coming up. His fingers stopped. My bass riff waited. He watched me truly bare my teeth. His cue came and went.

I closed my mouth before I turned around again. I knew now, I was dying.

We had a room in the club for the night, for the equipment. Ben, keyboardist, grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. I swore at him before I saw what he was looking for, and saw that he had seen it. He didn’t leg go of my shoulder. “Why didn’t you fucking say you weren’t immune?”

I put my bass aside. He was going to dislocate something if he squeezed harder. “You didn’t say you were.”

Ben let go of my shoulder, just to throw the first punch. Once he’d decided to throw it, he had no regrets. He’d already weighed the consequences and benefits of the punch and found my unbruised face wanting. While I was running my tongue over my teeth to check for any sudden gaps, the drummer, Nico, said, “York, man. You need a Needle. ASAP.”

Ben took me to the wall with his forearm across my throat. My knee jostled my guitar. The strings rattled metallically. “Don’t be an idiot, Nico. Rich boy doesn’t have the funds he once did. Can buy yourself a million cigarettes, but not a Needle. But a knife doesn’t cost anything. Where’s the switchblade? Who’re you going to use it on?”

“You don’t need to worry about me using it on any of you,” I said, “because you won’t get that far if you don’t let go of me.”

Ben didn’t know enough about me to know whether I meant it or not. I watched his face change, as though he wasn’t sure what he was looking at anymore. Then I realized my mouth was open, my jaw clenched, my grimace at a warning angle. I could be dangerous without meaning to be, now. Ben took several steps back, as quickly as he could while looking deliberate and in control. “Even Theo Cole-York isn’t good for anything if he’s dead. Go get some functional organs. But if you touch me, I’ll take the rest out of you.”

Nico tried to exchange a look with me as he went after Ben. I ignored it. Declan put his guitar away and looked up. I allowed the look, then went to look in the mirror. The lichen was a little too thick on my tongue to get rid of with excessive swallowing. It wasn’t near thick enough to choke me yet. But it tickled in my throat where it crept up from my heart.

It came from an animal. All diseases came from birds or bats or rats when scientists didn’t really any clue where they came from. In three weeks, over two hundred thousands people that had been completely healthy at the beginning of those weeks had dropped dead. Sick before the news stations could properly report the illnesses. Cases rose. Hospitals overflowed. Freezer trucks stopped at hundreds of houses a day, then returned to those houses a few days later for the ones that had come into contact with the first. All of it the same symptoms. Choking. Vomiting. Lichen growing across the tongue. Similar to a species that grew in North America. Fingers were pointed. But what did it matter? The whole world was sick.

Francesca had played for four days after the vomiting started. She didn’t stop until she stopped breathing on stage. We hadn’t been sharing a bed on that tour, but I’d been exposed. The disease didn’t need touch. It didn’t need close quarters. It hardly needed air. It was everywhere. We were all just waiting to see who would be the last one, the one without anyone else to call for a truck to come pick up the body when they were gone.

There would be no vaccine. There weren’t enough healthy people to develop one.

But a cure. It was an old story, in a lot of cultures. A belief that to become even stronger, you needed not just to defeat your enemy, but to eat him. Then you would absorb your strength. It was beyond belief now. The philosopher’s stone grew in the human heart and lungs, and it wasn’t a perennial crop. The cure was as finite as the population.

But for fifty percent of the population, things were looking up.

I threw up a week later. And every night after that. On the third night, I saw it wasn’t only me. Declan had just decided to do it in a trash bin outside a club instead of in the washroom. His vomit still smelled of vomit, regular sick and acidic. I could tasty the leafy sick in my own mouth.

Declan leaned away from the bin. He spat out a clump of wet lichen.

“Manners,” I said.

Declan snorted. He didn’t get up. His lean looked less like a lean every second, and more like a magician’s trick of levitating over magnets. “Where’d you hear a fancy word like that?”

“I know you’re trying to get me to feel all right, but I’m onto you,” I said. “You’re worse off than me.” Some people just went faster than others.

Declan lolled his head. Then he shook it properly. “York, go get a Needle. What are you waiting for?”

I searched for a moment before I found my voice. Declan never looked at the Needles. “You said your sister was in one of those. Kids. Parents.”

“Yeah, and they’re all dead already.” Declan spat into the bin again. He let his eyes close. “You’re not.”

“I’m not rich either. It’s not in my income bracket.” I sat on the edge of another bin. The alleyway smelled like the inside of a freezer truck. The smell of exposure. My stomach roiled again; I don’t know what with. My tongue was so thick with lichen I’d hardly eaten. “Between the two of us, if one of us was going to survive, it should be you.”

Declan leaned his head against the bin. He didn’t open his eyes. “This is the wrong time to have a conscience, York.”

I’d swallowed enough alcohol to drown a rat. It was the only rebuke the nausea listened to. I wouldn’t be on a stage again after this. I could feel it. Once you felt it in your chest, they said, you were on your last legs. Almost dead. I had a hand on my chest, like I could touch it from outside, and a hand on my bass, which was half holding me up.

Ben and Nico, and a few guys who worked in the club, watched me in between setting up and getting their own drinks. I smelled the disease on myself.

No one touched the guitar case. “Who’s seen Declan?” I asked.

Ben moved jerkily, like he’d been the one drinking. He kicked open the guitar case to pull something out of it. His voice was dark, unrecognizable. “He left this for you.”

I just caught it when he tossed it at me. Inside the silver case was a Needle, wet with condensation, heavy with Declan’s heart.  

Art by Alisha/asmeesh

Text by Lucie MacAulay