Crazytimes Page 4

  Another server, a tall man, passes by my table, and I stop him, asking if they have a phone I can use.

  “Not working,” he says. “Service is out all over town.”

  How would he know that unless he’s been outside? Out among the crazies. The murderers. The guys shitting in jars and throwing them at people and the naked ladies with mutating bubbly necks.

  My server returns with my spring rolls and sets the plate down without a word, then moves along to fill teacups at another table. The other server, whom I asked about the phone, goes through the door to the kitchen, and I could swear I see him grab his neck before the door swings back.

  I panic. Maybe it’s okay, though. Maybe he’s just stiff and giving an achy muscle a comforting squeeze. Too tough to tell for sure, but everything seems low-key here. I take a deep breath, inhaling the aromas of the room, and bite into a spring roll. The wrapper crackles and flakes all over the plate and the red paper placemat beneath it.

  Someone in the kitchen screams something. I can’t understand what, and I tense up, but then I hear others laugh in response. Things quiet down almost immediately, and the two servers reappear with smiles on their faces, so I assume all is well. Someone just told a joke.

  I take another bite and glance around the room, and that’s when I realize things aren’t quite right after all. At one table, a couple has produced a bottle of ketchup and a jar of mayonnaise, and the woman is squeezing ketchup in a spiral pattern on top of her noodles, while the man is reaching into the mayo jar with as many fingers as he can fit, before throwing dollops of it onto his chunks of orange something.

  In the opposite corner, a man is slicing across the palm of his hand with a knife and letting it drip into his soup with a smile. A little boy is on the floor, licking the carpet. And a woman has been calmly tugging at her own hair, plucking it out in small batches. She’s half bald at this point. I hadn’t noticed any of this before, somehow.

  As I witness all of this, I reach for my teacup and take a sip to wash down my spring roll. Then I spit the liquid out, spraying the seat across from me.

  “More pee?” the server with the teapot says, appearing again as if from nowhere. She’s scratching her neck and now I can see the purple marks creeping out from beneath her collar. They were hidden by her hair before.

  I swing my body sideways, sliding my legs out so I can deliver a push-kick to her midsection with both of them, sending her stumbling toward the center of the room.

  There’s another scream from the kitchen, and a clattering sound as dishes fall and a cook comes barreling out, both hands firmly grasped around the wooden handle of a wok, brandishing it like a weapon. He looks crazed, his eyes spinning violently in circles, and his shoulders are hunched and severely bubbled as if he had stashed a half dozen baseballs under his shirt. Purple streaks crisscross his neck, encasing yellow blisters in a grid. He begins swinging the wok, swiping at every person in his path.

  The boy on the floor stands up, giggling as he points at the cook, just before the wok clangs across his head. The cook takes aim at the teapot lady next, but she raises the steel pot up in defense. The metal on metal collision is loud, and when the lid is dislodged, hot piss splatters across the center of the room. The server laughs like it’s the funniest thing she’s ever seen.

  In unison, the other patrons stand up, and the place explodes in chaos. The woman with the ketchup bottle bites the ear off the mayo guy. Another diner begins juggling soy sauce bottles while singing “Farmer in the Dell.” When he drops one, he throws the other two at other patrons. One shatters on the wall by the booth next to mine, and I take cover to avoid the tiny bits of glass that rain down. A few dots of soy sauce stain my sleeve and for some reason I wonder if the sodium will be absorbed by my skin. A little girl runs to the corner and starts chewing on the leaves of the chrysanthemum tree while clawing at her neck with both hands. A man tears two sculpted golden Mandarin characters off the wall and runs out the door with them. Another cook runs out from the kitchen with a large metal bowl and screams “Tofuuuuu tiiiime!” at the top of his lungs, then tries stuffing handfuls of bean curd cubes into the mouths of other people.

  With no obvious clear path through the melee, I slink down in my seat and attempt to hide under the table. If I can go unnoticed for a few minutes, maybe they’ll all kill each other and I can escape.

  And just like that, a third man bursts through the kitchen door with a roar. He has a chef’s knife in each hand—in fact, they appear to be bound in place, with chrome-colored duct tape wrapped haphazardly around both fists. He swings wildly back and forth, emitting a grunt with each swipe.

  The blades slice with virtually no resistance, opening necks and faces and wrists and stomachs. Bodies begin to fall, blood spurts everywhere, and the screams in the room dwindle as the diners and staff expire one by one. The floor is suddenly a patchwork of corpses in dark red puddles and disrupted platters of chicken, rice, broccoli, tofu, snow peas, and lo mein.

  The man with the knives spots me beneath the table. He’s at the opposite end of the dining room, which gives me a few seconds, but I have to act on instinct. I move from my knees to my feet, pressing up on the bottom of the table, launching it as far as I can in the madman’s direction. Which isn’t very far because it’s heavier than I expected, or maybe I’m just not as strong as I thought, even with the adrenaline pumping. But at least it can act as a partial barrier, I think—an obstacle he has to navigate before reaching me.

  I run for the kitchen door, thinking I can escape out the back while the knife guy climbs over the bodies and furniture in the trashed dining room. He screams at me, a babbling roar I don’t recognize as being composed of any actual words.

  When I push through the swinging door, I discover there’s someone else back there. He doesn’t say a word, but he’s clearly angry. And he doesn’t exactly look human anymore. His neck, shoulders, upper arms, and chest have bubbled out to an extreme degree. The size of him makes me think of some cartoon version of a professional wrestler, or a weightlifter who only works on his upper body, but expanded to a comically large size. He’s so big, I don’t know how his legs can even support the weight. Purple lines hatch across his neck, between rows of little yellow blisters. And the giant blisters, the bubbles deforming his upper body, pulsate independently, as if each of them is breathing on its own. There’s so much bulk, he can’t turn his head, and I can’t understand how he can even move his arms, but he does, somehow.

  He grabs both sides of a large steel refrigerator and tips it over sideways so it blocks the back door. He howls with laughter, arching his body backward slightly, the same way a werewolf would bark at the moon. So much for that idea. I’m fucked.

  So now I have a decision to make, and I make it fast. No way I’m dealing with this mutant. I’ll have to take my chances with the knife guy. I look around the prep tables and grab a knife of my own.

  Then I take a deep breath and kick the swinging door back open toward the dining room. It catches on the treads of somebody’s unmoving foot and stays open.

  The knife guy is standing right there, waiting for me to reappear. His eyes are spinning and he’s got a smile on his face like he’s about to feast on something. I charge at him with my own blade as he swings his back and forth with both arms, sure to slice me as soon as I’m within striking distance. I should’ve thought through this better. But in a stroke of dumb luck, I slip on some blood and fall flat on my face well before reaching him. My knife goes flying, and lands several feet away, propping up against one of the newly deceased.

  He dives in my direction, both knives coming down, but I manage to grab the one cook’s wok off the ground and use it as a shield to deflect the swiping blades. The guy falls down, and from my knees, I pound him in the head three times with the wok. He’s out. Maybe dead? Not sure.

  I take a second to catch my breath, then stand back up. I find my knife among the bodies and the wreckage and stuff it under my belt on my hip,
hoping it’ll stay in place as I move about.

  The giant in the kitchen screams like a lion and charges at me, and I tense up again, but he’s mutated so large he can’t fit through the doorway. He strains and pushes against the doorframe and I feel like it’s going to give, but thankfully it doesn’t. He seems to have trapped himself in.

  I debate whether or not I should take the wok with me, but ultimately decide not to, since I think it will only draw attention my way, and that’s something I definitely don’t need any more of today. I have the knife to defend myself with, and if that’s not enough, well . . . then maybe I don’t need to make it through the day. I’m so confused, panicked, tired. I wonder where Isa is, and if she’s okay. I wonder how expansive this thing is—this event, for lack of a better word. Is it a disease? Mass insanity? No, it can’t just be that—there’s this bizarre mutation factor, like something out of a sci-fi movie.

  I hear a boom outside, the loudest one I’ve heard in a while. It’s time to go.

  I wave goodbye to the mutant in the kitchen doorway, and start for the front. He sees me go and intensifies his efforts to break through the doorframe—I can feel the room shake with his efforts, and I see a bubble on one of his shoulders explode in a mess of purple goo—but the doorframe holds. He’s stuck there, maybe for good.

  Good.

  Then I hear a second voice groan behind me, and I turn to see the guy with the knife hands, awake again, suddenly coming at me, his eyes spinning even more wildly than before. I see one side of his neck bubble and burst outward in mid-stride, and his groan becomes a terrifying shriek of laughter as he closes in. I slide out of the way at the last second. He crashes into the front window, which makes a reverberating sound—it’s thick plexi instead of real glass—and I grab two fists full of chopsticks off the table at the front of the room. I turn back toward him as he rights himself and dives at me again, still laughing, and I jam both bundles of bamboo chopsticks, still wrapped in their red paper sleeves, into his spinning eyes with a single sickening crunch. Blood spurts from the clogged holes and yellow and purple goop sputters out both sides of his mouth. His knife hands fall backward, and so does he. One last groan escapes his lips. He’s finally dead.

  I take another deep breath, and peek outside. It still seems calm on this block, but now that’s the sort of thing that makes me nervous. I have no choice, though. I have to go.

  7

  WHEN I GET to the intersection at the end of the block, the world seems so much more active.

  There’s a lot more traffic, as if people are trying to get out of the city. Horns are blaring. People are yelling. I see smoke coming from no more than a block away, and I can smell whatever’s burning. A man in mechanic’s coveralls and a red, white, and blue clown wig cartwheels down the sidewalk, saying “yippee-yippee-yippee” as he goes. The sky above still has that unusual haze I noticed this morning. It’s the color of rust, and I feel like the city is corroded in a way it wasn’t just yesterday.

  The moment I look up, something screams out of the sky at an angle—a bright, blazing thing—and crashes right into the middle of the intersection. The sound of the impact is deep, practically unbearable, and I realize the booming sounds I’ve been hearing since I woke up are probably the result of whatever this is.

  The ground shakes as the pavement explodes open, sending chunks of rubble and dirt in all directions and knocking me off my feet. Tiny bits of gravel pummel me as I fall, and I end up choking on some of the fine debris. When the smoke and dust begin to clear, I see the impact has left a huge crater in the center of the intersection, and a pair of cars, one from each of both one-way streets, have tumbled down into the hole.

  People are screaming, and I don’t know if it’s because they’re scared or because they’re crazy. I’m guessing it’s a bit of both.

  Someone yells “What the fuck was that?! A comet?! A meteor?! A missile?!”

  A large woman with a bubbly neck and the familiar purple-lined pattern on it walks by calmly, pushing a baby carriage that appears to be loaded with chunks of concrete. She smiles at everyone she passes, as if they’re her neighbors and she’s just taking her infant out for a mid-afternoon stroll. She stops short of the intersection and leans over to pick up a sizable chunk of blacktop to add to her collection. She drops it gently into the pram and jumps up and down, announcing “I got ’em all now!”, before wheeling the carriage over the edge of the crater and following it in herself, diving with perfect form, as if into a swimming pool. She screams on the way down then falls silent.

  I run to the edge of the hole and spot her at the bottom among the wreckage. Her blistered neck appears to have popped—perhaps she broke it in the fall—and she’s lying in a puddle of red and yellow and purple slime. Blood spurts from several parts of her twisted frame, but her neck looks the worst. She’s unresponsive, but the blistered mess of her neck seems to continue pulsing.

  Her collection of concrete has spilled out from the carriage, and amongst the rubble, I can see the body of a small child, flattened, bruised, and bloody. It’s a heartbreaking sight on its own, but it also reminds me again of my brothers. I was there when they died, all those years ago. Although the memory of that day is somewhat foggy, I can still remember the sight of their dead bodies, and I feel guilty for being alive when their lives were cut so short.

  The cars at the bottom of the crater are wrecked too, crumpled and twisted hunks of metal. There is no movement within, and I have to assume, with all I’ve seen, that the drivers are dead now too.

  I fight the urge to puke all of a sudden, and I’m not sure why this is the first time I’ve felt that way today. Maybe the spring rolls were spoiled? Could they have poisoned me at the restaurant?

  I see something else at the bottom of the hole too. A rock, charred black, but glowing yellow and red from within, the light visible through the valleys of the ridges on its surface. It’s about the size of a bowling ball. I assume it’s a meteor. Or a meteorite. Or a comet. I have no idea what the difference is. Maybe I should’ve paid better attention as a kid in science class.

  A yellow gas hisses out of the rock in a series of short bursts. Puffs of smoke rise up above the street level, then each travels in a different direction, as if sentient, and not at all reliant on the flow of the air. I duck beneath one headed my way, though I don’t know if it makes a difference.

  8

  ONCE I’M ABLE to escape the scene of the crash, I begin walking west, toward my part of town, and away from the river. I’m not sure why, other than the fact that subconsciously, everyone likes to be at home, whatever or wherever their “home” may be. My house hasn’t felt much like home lately—not since Isa left—so I’m not sure it’s that. But I also feel like staying away from the city’s water supply is probably a good idea right now. Does that have anything to do with the river that flows along the eastern edge of the city, though? I have no idea. That’s something else I probably should’ve paid more attention to in school. Regardless of where the water comes from, I decide I better not drink any unless it’s bottled. Goddamn, I’m thirsty. I can still taste the hot piss from Wok Around the Clock.

  I think about taking the subway west, but decide it might be best to stay above ground for the time being. Maybe. I just know I wouldn’t want to be trapped inside a moving metal tube with any of these crazy people. It may not even be running anyway.

  Down one street I find a series of bloody, severed nipples lying on the blood-spattered ground like a trail of breadcrumbs. I wonder where the people these nipples once belonged to could be, but decide not to follow the trail to find out.

  Everywhere I go, I hear people laughing and screaming, even if I can’t see them. I almost want to laugh at the absurdity of all of this myself, but I don’t. I’d rather scream anyway. But I do neither and instead, just keep walking.

  I pass by a guy who I think might be my friend from the coffee shop, but he’s got his apron and shirt pulled up over his head, so I can’t be s
ure. He’s walking around blindly, flapping his arms like wings, and thankfully he doesn’t see me. I don’t stop him to say hi.

  A while later, I get to the western edge of Center City. I’ve kept my Thousand Yard Stare the whole way, and I’ve seen things I never expected to encounter in my life. Things I never would have thought possible outside of old paperbacks and disaster movies.

  I walk past the library, which looks like it must have been hit by a meteor. The front steps are ruined and there’s a big hole with wisps of smoke pouring out where the main entrance used to be.

  I think of poor Henry Bemis from The Twilight Zone, then remember I have his action figure in my pocket. I take him out for a second, look at Burgess Meredith’s bespectacled face, and squeeze him in my fist. I’m glad I brought him along. He’s my good luck charm now, and I’m going to survive as long as I can, just like he did, no matter what cruel fate awaits me. I’m glad, at least, that I don’t wear glasses.

  As I continue moving, I see a bus turned on its side, half in the street, half in the sidewalk, with a guy standing on top of it, bouncing up and down, screaming and raising his hands up to the sky as if he is attempting to beckon a meteor to take him out. Even at a distance, I recognize him as my bus driver from this morning, and I’m more than happy to keep my distance. His laughter echoes through the air. At least he finally stopped for something.

  Soon, I’ve escaped Center City alive—which, when I stop to think about it, seems amazing and unlikely. Of course, technically I’m still in the city, but the west side of town is far more residential and doesn’t feel like what most people would refer to as “the city.” It’s a little more open, with wider streets and buildings that rise no more than three stories above the ground instead of skyscrapers towering over everything.