Joseph Farley

Last Chance Romance

Ike tried to get Bernie to stop fucking the corpse. His shouts had no effect. He wound up wrestling his buddy off of the body.

“What’s wrong with you? You don’t have protection.”

“With what I’ve got, it doesn’t matter,” Bernie answered. “Doc said I’ll be dead in less than a year. “

Both men were in their mid-twenties. They had been friends since high school.  They had been on crew together back then. In college they had been too busy partying and chasing skirts to try out for any sports.

“You trying to speed up the clock?” Ike said. “Look, it’s been a long time since I have seen a woman, living or dead, with all her parts, but I ain’t going bat shit like you are man.  Self-discipline. Remember what Doc taught us.”

“We make our choices,” Bernie said. “Might be months before we see another woman, living or dead, like you said. Might even be a year. Considering my situation, I’ll take what I can get.”

“You’re a sick man”

“I know,” Bernie said. He grinned with teeth clenched. It was a strange grin, possibly full of irony, maybe full of anger, maybe both and more. 

“I am not likely to get better,” Bernie said, trying to shake loose of his friend’s grip.  “Let me go.”

“You want to rape that corpse some more?” said Ike. His eyes were wide. Nostrils flared. It was not so much anger as disgust and disappointment.

“Yeah. I need to get back to business.  I’ve got nothing better to do. Not likely to get better opportunities either.”

Ike relaxed his grip. Bernie remounted the corpse. 

Ike turned his back. He didn’t want to watch. 

The sound of Ike going at it with his dead hook-up became too much for him. He decided to take a walk. 

Bernie’s grandmother had offered the boys a hundred bucks to clean out the basement of her house in the Germantown section of Philadelphia. It was an old building dating back to before the Revolution. It required a lot of upkeep. Bernie’s grandmother had not been able to afford to pay for repairs anymore. No one else in the family wanted to take over the deed and be responsible for the taxes and constant maintenance. The decision had been made to prep the place for sale. 

While they were filling trash bags the two friends found a section of wall in the basement was hollow.  

“Probably where they hid runaways before the Civil War.” Bernie’s grandmother had told them. “ Family legend has it that the house was a stop on the Underground Railway.”

“They should turn the house into a museum,” Ike had told her.

“Too many houses like it around here,” she had said. “Can’t all be museums. Plenty of houses that were turned into museums around here in the past were turned back into private residences or torn down for new construction. There is not enough money in history. Not around here. We have too much history. Too much crime as well.”

The boys opened up the wall to see what was behind it. They found more than a hiding place. A tunnel went out towards the street. There it ended. Blocked by a wall of bricks.

“Must have been closed off when they put in water pipes and sewers,”  Bernie had postulated.

That was when IT happened. The unthinkable that had never really been unthinkable.  War is never impossible, and in war, every and any weapon can be used. 

Ike kept walking until he could no longer hear what was happening behind the burned out gas station. He paused for a while, then went on, not sure he was far enough away for his stomach.  When he felt safe, he stopped.

Ike looked around his world.  It was not the world he had been born into.

No clouds. No birds. Only gray clouds of smoke. 

The ground was no better. Not a blade of grass. Not a single insect.

Ike thought the only thoughts he could. They were not nice thoughts. He didn’t like that. It was better not to think. Better to be half dazed. 

Or maybe dead.

Doc has been the last sane person they had met, unless you counted the dead. 

The dead seemed to have it all together, until they fell apart.   

Occasionally there were maggots or tiny worms, parasites maybe, on the bodies they had come across. Ike took that as a good sign. Something would survive. Maybe a hidden seed would sprout somewhere. Maybe he would find it, something green growing in the dust. 

“Struggle on,” Doc had told them. “The strong and the lucky might have a chance. Even having the right genes, good health, and good luck might not be enough. We need to be smart. Practical. See the opportunities.”

Doc claimed to have been a real MD, before the end so to speak. Ike and Bernie found him near what had once been the University of Pennsylvania.

“I practiced medicine some,” Doc had told them. “Did research in a lab on the side. Tried to solve medical mysteries. Help make a better world and all that. What a waste.”

The three of them had traveled together for a few weeks.  They searched buildings that had already been gone through by other scavengers. Water and food were the top priorities. If they found anything else that could help them keep living, they took that as well. Ike and Barry built up a collection of tools that could double as weapons. Not everyone they had met had been friendly. Doc kept notes about where other potentially useful things were found, such as books on medicine and science,

Ike thought Doc was maybe forty or so. Looked like he had always kept fit. He seemed a good guy. In many ways he was. 

Doc had examined Ike and Bernie, checking them for all kinds of ailments. He patched them up best he could where patching was needed, and shared all the advice he had on how to survive.

It was Doc who had diagnosed what was wrong with Bernie. Part of it, maybe all of it, was due to radiation. Cancer is never great to have however you come by it.

One night Doc scampered away while Ike and Bernie were sleeping.  Doc took most of their accumulated supplies with him, including most of the water and food. It had taken Ike and Bernie months of scrounging to obtain everything they had. Now it was gone.

Survival.

What a nasty way to live.

Ike decided he had been away long enough for Bernie to have concluded his business. He started to walk back to where Bernie was. 

Broken concrete pillars were all that remained of an interstate highway. Fractured bricks lay among dots of glass and melted auto tires. Scavengers had already carried off everything metal in that area.  He wondered if they had lived long enough to do anything with all that metal. Had they made anything? Had they bartered it?  Where? With whom?

South, Ike thought. Or west. Maybe more had survived in Maryland or Chester County or elsewhere far from cities. 

When Ike got to where he had left Bernie, his buddy had finished and was wiping himself clean with a rag. The rag was filthy. It was caked with a bit of everything and anything. 

Bernie carried that rag everywhere with him. Rags were hard to come by. Rags had uses. Ike also had one.

“Next time we find a puddle we’ll have to wash up,” Ike said. “Bodies first. Then clothes, etc.”

“After we fill our water bottles,” said Bernie. “That is top priority.”

“Yes, of course.  After we fill our water bottles. “

Bernie gestured towards the corpse. “You want sloppy seconds?”

Survival. Struggle on.

Ike contemplated reality.  It was not a peaceful form of meditation. It brought him no tranquility. 

Ike looked at the corpse. She might have once been a good looking woman. That may have been wishful thinking. Now it was hard to tell what she had looked like really. At least you could tell she had been a woman. A woman without rot set in.

He wondered if anyone had gotten to the body before Bernie. Ike doubted it. He needed to feel a little optimism. That helps you survive, being optimistic. Doc had taught them that. 

But another part of his mind whispered to Ike, “This is it. Don’t pretend that you will make it much longer.”

He could not deny that he had needs.

He wrestled with his morals, what was left of what he had learned from his parents and in school. He wrestled. He fought hard against the reality he saw everywhere. In the end, morals lost. 

“Sure,” Ike said. “What the hell.”

Afterwards, they headed south.